BUYING A HOUSE IN FRANCE - HOW TO BUY FRENCH PROPERTY - AGENTS IMMOBILIER

Above: Trompe l'oeil in Agde, Herault, France.

Above: Two views from the old walled city of Angoulême, Poitou-Charente, France.

AGENTS IMMOBILIER

Estate agents in France are called agents immobilier - their offices are called agences immobilières - and the person who handles the legal aspects of the transaction of buying a French property is called a Notaire. (Follow the link on the top menu for more about Notaires). Rather confusingly, some notaires also have books of properties for sale. Whilst you will find the offices of immobiliers easily on the high streets of major towns, it is a lot harder to find notaires. They are frequently tucked away in an obscure back street and quite often do little or nothing to advertise the fact that they have properties for sale.
There are many more immobiliers than there used to be some years ago, maybe because of the increasing demand for houses in France from foreign buyers, and it is not unusual nowadays to find immobiliers even in relatively small towns. Many of the immobilier are bilingual or employ English speaking staff and there are also a fair number of British estate agents working in France.

If you chose to go through one of the Internet French property web sites to look for your house in France, they will normally book appointments with French estate agents, on your behalf, to view the properties displayed on their web sites. Some of them can also provide discounted ferry prices. The Internet company I used did not charge me a fee for this service and so was presumably paid from the commission of the immobilier that I bought my house through. If you are purchasing an expensive property it would be as well to check whether this results in a higher overall fee from the immoblier in order to cover the commission of the internet company.

On the question of commission, it is normal in France for the purchaser not the vendor to pay the fees and this includes the immobilier, and the notaire. Expect fees from the immobilier of between 5%-10% of the net purchase price.
The displayed price of the property often includes these fees & will be marked F.A.I., (Frais d’Agence Inclus), but it makes sense to verify with the immobilier that his total fees are included in the displayed price.

COMMENTS ON IMMOBILIER

Don't assume because you are paying the immoblier's fees that they are working for you. They aren't. They have been engaged by the vendor and they are in business to sell property. I found that, as in England, they had a tendency to play down the defects in a property and talk up the virtues in order to secure a sale, and in the infamous phrase, they can sometimes be: "Economical with the truth."
We had one agent, as we were standing in the front room of a french property, swear blind that the house was on a quiet road even as their words were being drowned out by the regular rumble of artics trundling right past the front door.
Another agent, a Brit this one working in France, tried to dismiss a leaning gable end as merely the outside stone wall pulling away from the inner leaf. A visual check inside the property by me quickly revealed that, by the gap between the floorboards and the wall, the whole gable end would need rebuilding.
This same agent, when later on asked how long a property had been on the market replied vaguely, "Not long." I later checked and found the exact answer was two years. Whilst two years is not an abnormally long time for a property to be on the market in France, as a Brit he would have known that this was a misleading statement to someone used to the quick turnaround of the British market.
So take note, the usual applies:

CAVEAT EMPTOR - BUYER BEWARE.

When buying in France, you could get the opinion of the immoblier about whether to offer less than the asking price for the house. Some French internet estate agencies state that, "Too low an offer could be considered as an insult by the vendor". Whether this is in fact true, or merely a statement designed to keep prices (and thus commission) higher, I leave for you to judge.

However, it is common in Normandy, and this may be true across France, for the vendor to indicate to the agent a minimum price he is prepared to accept when the house goes up for sale. If the property has been on the market for some time he may be ready to sell the house at that stated lower price so always ask the immobilier what the minimum price is.