Buying a Home in France as a Professional Footballer

You have signed. You report to training this week. Your family arrives at the end of the season, maybe. And a French purchase takes roughly three months from accepted offer to final deed. Those timelines do not line up, and nobody at the club is going to fix that for you.

Homelike Home has been searching for professional footballers and their families since 2003.

Tell us where you have signed.

The transfer window sets your timeline, not the market

The sequencing is the whole problem. A purchase in France runs around three months between the offer and the signature at the notary’s office, longer if the mortgage is a non-resident file. You do not have three months. You have a medical, a presentation and a first session.

The way through is to split the two. We secure a rental so you can play, and we run the purchase search in parallel, with no pressure to take the first thing that appears. We do both: our search fee on a rental is one month’s rent excluding charges, minimum €3,500 including tax. The purchase runs on our degressive scale, payable only on the day you sign.

The training ground defines your perimeter, not the city

Foreign players arrive with a map of the city and a shortlist of famous districts. That is not how the search works. What matters is the drive to the training ground at 8am on a match week, not the postcard. French training centres often sit outside the city, in the suburbs or the countryside, so the right home is frequently not in the neighbourhood you had in mind.

A posting in Paris rarely means living in central Paris. That is exactly why our Grand Paris team covers the suburbs as thoroughly as our Paris team covers the arrondissements. Tell us where you train and we build the perimeter around it.

Discretion is a requirement, not a preference

Every public listing is a published address. Every viewing you attend in person is a photograph waiting to happen. For most buyers that is an annoyance. For a player it is a security question, and it is why this clientele belongs on the off-market side of the market.

We pre-visit in your name. You see reports, photos and video before anyone sees you. Access to properties that never reach a portal, through notaries, private wealth managers and owners who sell confidentially, is not an add-on here. It is the point.

Buy or rent? Be honest about the contract

A three-year deal can become a January loan. Buying works when the market underneath you is liquid enough to exit without a discount, and that is a question about your specific city and your specific segment. We answer it before you commit, not after.

We are paid on success only, so we have no reason to push you into a purchase that does not fit your contract. If the answer is rent now and buy in eighteen months, that is the answer.

The second search: your family

The player usually comes first and the family follows. That is two searches, not one, and the second has different criteria: a bilingual or international school within a reasonable drive, space, a garden, a neighbourhood where a partner who does not speak French can build a life. We treat it as its own brief rather than a footnote to yours. Our expatriation service was built for exactly this.

Buying as a non-resident, when you are never available

Non-resident lending needs a deposit of 20 to 30% and a thorough file: contract, proof of income, bank statements, sometimes translated. The part that matters most to you is the last one. Signing can be done by power of attorney at the notary’s office, so the final deed never has to compete with an away fixture or international duty. Our guide on buying property in France as a foreigner covers the file in detail.

Since 2003

Christine Collombel-Pelosse founded Homelike Home in 2003 and has been running searches for footballers and their families ever since. Two things have not changed. We represent the buyer and only the buyer, never the seller, so our advice answers to nobody else. And we are paid on success, on the day you sign, so the search costs you nothing until it works.

Our agencies cover Paris and Greater Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nice and Lille, five of the cities where French top-flight football is played, along with Bordeaux, Nantes, Aix-en-Provence, Normandy, Brittany, the Basque Country and Milan. Wherever the transfer takes you, we are already there. Discover our property finder agencies across France.

Tell us where you have signed

Give us the club, the reporting date and the brief. We take it from there: the rental that gets you playing, the search that runs quietly in the background, and the family home for when they land. You keep your focus on the season.