The house in Normandy was the easy part. The surprise comes a few months later, in the form of a French tax notice nobody mentioned during the viewings. Owning property in France as a foreign resident means paying tax on it every year, and a substantial bill on the day you sell. For an owner […]

You have found the house, agreed a price and shaken hands. Then the notaire sends the provisional statement, and the figure at the bottom is tens of thousands of euros higher than the one you negotiated. On an existing property in France, acquisition costs add roughly 7% to 8% to the price, payable in full […]

Most buyers arrive with a region already chosen, usually by a summer holiday or a film. It is rarely the right one. France counts around 3.7 million second homes, one property in ten, and the country is far more varied than it looks from abroad: a three-hour drive changes the climate, the architecture, the price […]

What Americans need to know before buying a second home in France: where to look, how the process differs from a US closing, what it really costs and how to buy from four thousand miles away.

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 […]