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Nine hours, and what that actually costs you<\/h2>\n
From New York the gap is six hours and the French working day ends as yours begins. From San Francisco it is nine. When the French market comes alive at 9am in Paris, it is midnight here. When you open your laptop at 8am, it is 5pm in Paris and the day is nearly over. Your usable window with a French agency is roughly two hours, between 8 and 10 in the morning, Pacific time.<\/p>\n
That would matter less if France worked like the United States. It does not. There is no MLS, no centralised feed every agent can show you. Listings sit scattered across independent agencies, competing portals, notaire networks and private sellers, and a well-priced Paris apartment can be gone in 48 hours. So the fragmented searching that a French buyer does by hand happens entirely while you are asleep. And unlike Washington or New York, the direct flight runs about eleven hours, which takes the weekend trip for a decisive viewing off the table. Without someone able to see a property and act the same day, you are structurally second in line.<\/p>\n
Equity compensation and the French lending file<\/h2>\n
This is the part generic advice about buying in France never addresses. In technology, a large share of pay arrives as RSUs or options. A US lender is comfortable underwriting that: with a documented vesting history and evidence of continuance, it counts as income. French banks read it differently. They are built around regular, documented earnings, and a modest base salary attached to a variable component tied to one company’s share price falls outside their usual grids. Expect that portion to be heavily discounted, or set aside entirely, when your borrowing capacity is calculated.<\/p>\n
Two practical consequences follow. Your purchase timeline is governed by vest dates and liquidity windows rather than by a savings rate, which is something to plan around rather than discover late. And the choice between financing and paying cash should be settled early, with a broker used to expatriate files, instead of after a refusal nobody explains properly.<\/p>\n
There is also an argument here that applies to you more forcefully than to almost any other buyer. Your income is in dollars, your savings are in dollars, and a significant part of your net worth tracks a single company’s stock. Buying a tangible asset in euros is not one more allocation, it is the only genuine diversification available to you. A\u00a0buyer agent in Paris<\/a>\u00a0serves a capital preservation logic, with gross yields typically around 3 to 3.5%. A\u00a0buyer agent in Lyon<\/a>\u00a0serves a yield logic, closer to 4.5 to 6% gross, at a far lower entry price.<\/p>\n The federal picture is the familiar one and applies here as anywhere: worldwide income for citizens and green card holders, so French rental income is declared on both sides, dual filing despite the treaty’s foreign tax credit, and FBAR once your French accounts exceed 10,000 dollars combined at any point in the year.<\/p>\n California adds a layer worth examining before you buy, not after. The state taxes residents on worldwide income at a top marginal rate above 13%, and its credit for taxes paid elsewhere, claimed on Schedule S, is designed for other US states and possessions. The Franchise Tax Board’s own instructions exclude taxes paid to a foreign country. On that reading, French tax on your rental income would not offset your California liability, even though it does at federal level. Practitioners are not unanimous on this point, which is precisely why it is worth settling with your own adviser rather than assuming. It also raises the value of\u00a0furnished letting under the real regime<\/strong>, which brings French taxable income close to zero in most cases, and of\u00a0bare ownership<\/strong>, where you receive no income at all for fifteen years in exchange for a 30 to 40% discount at purchase. We set out both in our guide to\u00a0investing in French real estate from the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n We are property finders, which means we act as the buyer’s agent and nothing else. We hold no stock, we have no relationship with sellers or developers, and nothing is owed to us until the property is yours. Over twenty years we have guided a great many American and expatriate buyers who bought without ever setting foot in a French agency.<\/p>\n Buying from the Bay Area means never walking the street on a Saturday morning, never knowing whether it is noisy at seven in the evening, and depending entirely on what someone chooses to show you. That is where the work sits. We search the whole market including off-market, we carry out the viewings and the second viewings in your place, and our reports carry our reservations rather than only the flattering angles. We hold our calls in your morning, the one window that genuinely overlaps, and signature by proxy at the notaire spares you the eleven-hour flight. Our\u00a0buyer agents cover the whole of France<\/a>, on degressive fees from 2.90% down to 1.00% on the largest budgets, payable only at the signing of the final deed.<\/p>\nThe California layer nobody mentions<\/h2>\n
Homelike Home, buyer agents for expatriates since 2003<\/h2>\n
Talk to us about your project<\/h2>\n