For an Irish buyer, France looks like the easiest property market abroad. You are an EU citizen, you earn in euros, Paris is one hour ahead, and you can be in Bordeaux, Nantes or Nice before lunch. No visa, no currency risk, no residency paperwork worth mentioning. That ease is real, and it is also […]

Yes. France places no restriction on lending to foreign nationals, and American buyers finance French property every week. But the honest version of that answer comes with three conditions that nobody mentions until you are three weeks into an application: you will need a substantially larger deposit than a French resident, your file will take […]

Walk east along rue du Temple in the 4th arrondissement and you will pass under a stone archway at number 41 without noticing it. Step through, and the street noise stops within three seconds. Behind it sits a silent cobbled courtyard framed in old stone and exposed beams, with a restaurant terrace in the middle […]

Brittany has more coastline than any other French region, roughly a third of the country’s entire shore packed into a peninsula the size of Massachusetts. It also has the widest internal price spread of any French region: some of the most expensive waterfront in northern France sits ninety minutes from some of the cheapest habitable […]

The short answer: a French real estate agent is hired by the seller, paid by the seller, and legally obliged to get the seller the best possible outcome. A buyer’s agent is hired by you, paid by you, and obliged to get you the best possible outcome. They are not two versions of the same […]

The South of France that most Americans picture is about forty miles of coastline between Cannes and Monaco. It is beautiful, it is famous, and it is priced accordingly. What that image leaves out is that the French Mediterranean runs for hundreds of miles, and that the single largest city on it is one most […]

Most American searches for Normandy start with an image rather than an address. A half-timbered farmhouse with apple trees. A cliff at Étretat. A cemetery above Omaha Beach where a grandfather’s unit is listed. The region delivers on all three, but they sit in different places, at very different prices, and they suit very different […]

Almost every American who starts looking at northwest France ends up with the same two names on the shortlist. Both regions are green, coastal and priced a long way below Paris, the Riviera or the Alps. Both look, from a browser in Chicago or Austin, more or less interchangeable: old stone houses, big skies, cliffs […]

The Bay Area sends a particular kind of buyer to France: technology professionals, founders, people whose careers moved them here for two years and kept them for ten, alongside Americans who simply want a European base. On paper the project looks like any other American purchase abroad. In practice three things make it materially harder […]

Washington concentrates profiles you meet nowhere else in the United States: World Bank and IMF staff, IDB and OAS professionals, federal and defence careers, think tank researchers, embassy postings. Six hours behind Paris, more than 6,000 kilometres away, and above all a set of tax positions that make the standard advice written for New York […]