The breaching butterfly

It has been very hot in the Pyrénées Atlantiques recently. Last week it topped 40 degrees with 95% humidity. If you want an idea of what that is like, put some very wet towels into your tumble dryer, turn on maximum, wait ten minutes and then poke your head inside. I defy you not to start dripping immediately. These temperatures are ‘exceptionel’ – normally August can be expected to hover in the low 30’s, an ideal temperature for toasting evenly all over and relaxing. The 40’s however are ‘excessif’ and people have either been escaping to the sea or the mountains. The transport-less have been hiding in their stone houses with the shutters firmly closed.
Being an estate agent, I was out and about. The Brits are back in force thanks to the nonstop rain back home and the favourable euro: pound exchange rate. For the first time since 2007 there are people looking for holiday homes. I had three English couples over the last few weeks. They were alarmingly white and scantily clothed. They didn’t wear hats. They didn’t drink much water. When the sun is cracking the flags, you need to cover up and drink at least a half a litre of water an hour.
The latest couple were from the North and nervously excited to be on the verge of buying in France. We kicked off with a town house in Orthez. 1930’s and with a swimming pool. The house has a forbidding grey render façade which I quickly whizzed them past – this house is one that looks better on the inside than the outside. The owner was away on holiday and the house smelled musty. The swimming pool was full of green weed. The clients were not impressed and I made a note to tell the owner he needs to make a bigger effort if he wants to sell.
We then went to a house 6 kms away in Sauveterre direction. Owned by an English couple, my clients loved it – the exposed stone walls, the beams, the fireplaces and the cool interior. They decided it was too far out of town and we carried onto Sauveterre where we saw an interesting property which has just come onto the market. There is a large 19th century house on a plot of 2 acres with a separate bungalow. The owners are willing to split the property for a quick sale. I had trouble finding this property in the warren of tiny roads and we had to follow an obliging post lady to their door.
We were approaching midday and the sky was washed clear of colour. We emerged from the air conditioning of my lovely Qashkai into a blast of sticky heat. The owners gave us water and sympathy and we were there an hour. The house has thick stone walls and was blissfully cool. Dogs panted on the stone flagged floors and a beautiful blue and brown eyed lurcher followed us around. We retreated to the conservatory and took in the garden. The Pyrenees were a pale purple haze on the horizon and the grass shimmered and waved in a green mirage. I told them the price and they were commented that they could not believe how much property you could get for your money over in France, compared to UK prices.
We dropped down to the Gave d’Oloron at Sauveterre and went for lunch at the Fil de l’eau, a tea and snack place which is open in the summer and is held on the lawns of a beautiful Béarnaise cottage owned by Sally and Mike Johnson. Children jumped in and out of the water and played badminton. Spanish, Irish, French and English voices mingled. The tables with their brightly coloured canapés were nearly all taken. Sally was in charge of sandwiches and rustled us up a delicious filled baguette with salad and coleslaw. We downed some very welcome soda and water and talked through what we had seen.
Refreshed, we then went back to Orthez where I channelled my inner Kirstie and showed them a ‘mystery house’. It has been my experience, after eight years in the job, that people often buy something which is completely different from their original criteria. People come to buy renovations and end up buying brand new. People who come to buy in the countryside are seduced by the convenience and attractions of a town centre apartment with large terrace and all the entertainments on foot. I wanted to show a property which was ideal for a holiday home and would rent out easily, a property with no work to do and one that was out of the ordinary.
We went to a village just outside of Orthez and down a little lane. A cool stream borders the 18th century cottage which we were going to see. There is a terrace and workshop and the kitchen patio doors open out onto a balcony overlooking the water. There is a kitchen/diner and living room and three bedrooms. As an extra, there is a patch of garden and a garage, though it is on the other side of the neighbour’s house. It is a snip at 149000 euros and well under their budget.
My clients were seduced however by the house in Sauveterre and rejected the mystery choice. My inner Kirstie was smirking and I told her to shut up. They went back to their B and B to have a think about what they had seen and I went to the pool in Salies de Bearn.
Salies de Bearn is a medieval town with winding cobbled streets, a thermal baths, golf, casino and lots of lovely little boutiques. It is bisected by the Saleys river which is overlooked by leaning 16th and 17th century houses on stilts. The weekly market had just finished and the street cleaners were busy whizzing around and cleaning up. The thermal baths is great in winter when you need a blast of salty heat. What I needed right then was something cool and chlorinated. The open air public baths is open between June and October and this is where I headed. There is a large camp site just next door and the baby bassin was full of golden haired Dutch children. I noted, with relief, that the aggressive cannonballing dwarf was having a day off. The deep end of the pool has diving boards and a crocodile of tawny backed children was lined up, ready to launch themselves in a series of limb crushing manoeuvres into the water. I put on my tinted goggles and started a lazy crawl up and down. Bubbles of air sparkled like fire flies as bodies shot into the water. Someone was pretending to be dead on the floor. A very large lady in a spotty black petticoat swimsuit was peddling across the shallow end in a nearly upright position. I swam with my head under water, following the black line of tiles across the floor. It was blissful and quiet with just the gurgling of the filtration system and the occasional squeaking from the metal ladders.
It didn’t last long, as Fanny put in an appearance. Fanny (not her real name) is of medium height, with a robust physique, tightly curled black hair and a Joan of Arc look in her eye. She is around 60 years of age and we have never seen her anywhere other than the pool. My kids think she spends the rest of the year in an institution… Her normal modus operandi is to stand at the side of the pool and engage the unwary in conversation. Being English is useful as she supposes that we don’t understand her. She talks to herself non stop and periodically berates the lifeguards for letting children into the pool.
I surfaced to find her facing me at the shallow end. She was crouched as if about to start a race and was hissing encouragement to herself through her teeth. ‘Ca tape forte – courage’ she urged and launched herself tumultuously into the water. She disappeared and I dipped my head under to see what was happening. Fanny was scooting along the bottom, hands running along the tiles and legs see-sawing back and to. I recommenced my swim and focused on reaching the other end in less than 30 strokes. The lifeguards were chatting amongst themselves and didn’t seem to have noticed that Fanny had disappeared.
A few seconds later, Fanny shot out of the water in a surprisingly realistic impression of a breeching whale. Arms extended and wearing a terrible grimace, she shrieked before plunging back under. Her feet appeared briefly. Nearly everyone was taken by surprise. She did the breaching butterfly stroke twice across the pool and then paused, out of breath, and went back to her normal breaststroke.
‘C’est elle qui fait l’animation!’ laughed the lifeguards and went back to chewing gum and chatting up the tourists.
If you want to enjoy Salies pool and see lovely houses, or even spot Fanny in action, pop over to www.landes-pyreneesproperties.com or give me a call on 0033559381991

French property prices second quarter 2012

Housing Market in Second Quarter 2012
Wednesday 01 August 2012

A recent batch of housing market reports all suggest the motor is running out of gas, but not everywhere it seems.

It hardly comes as any great surprise to hear from the French estate agents that sales activity has slowed in recent months.

In their latest review of the market, FNAIM, the national association of estate agents, state that sales are down by 15% in the second quarter over the same period last year; the national chain Century 21 claim a similar fall of 17% over the past year, while the Laforêt group of agents say sales have fallen by 11% in the second quarter over the same period in 2011.

Although there can be little doubt that the global financial crisis is setting the scene for such falls, the agents also points to a number of more prosiac factors:

The impact of the abolition of the interest free loan (PTZ) for older property in the number of first time buyers;
The reluctance by existing owners to accept any significant reduction in the asking price of their property;
A toughening of credit conditions from the banks, despite the lower interest rates available;
The reduction in the fiscal advantages available to investors, as well as the toughening of tax rules on capital gains.
So for once it seems the estate agents are all in agreement.

Well, not quite, because according to Jérôme Bost the marketing director at ERA chain of estate agents, “it all depends over which period you are making the comparison”.

He reminds us that it was a record year for sales in 2011, which continued into the first quarter, as buyers sold before the new capital gains tax rules came into force.

“Over a year it’s true that the number of sales has declined by around 15%, but if one compares sales in the first half of the year with the second half of 2011, then the fall is only around 5%”, he says.

‘Moreover”, he continues, “the fall in sales mainly concerns studio and 1 bed apartments which have been most affected by the abolition of first time buyer interest free mortgages and by the abolition of tax breaks on investment properties. If these properties are removed from the equation, then the slowdown is little more that the usual ‘wait and see’ approach that normally occurs in an election year”.

A similar view is expressed by Phillipe Taboret of mortgage brokers Cafpi, who says that “after a slow first quarter, the second quarter picked up a little in April and May and activity was strong in June”.

So although it seems that sales are falling, there remains a lack of agreement amongst the agents on the scale and nature of the downturn.

Prices

Be that as it may, there does at least some broad agreement that prices have remained stable.

The agents argue that a ‘vicious circle’ is happening, where existing owners, not themselves able to buy on a discounted basis, are then unwilling to reduce the sale price of their own property.

FNAIM consider there has been no real change in prices for the past nine months, following two years of price growth in 2010 and 2011.

Neither, they argue, during the second quarter did even Ile de France prove the exception, as prices also stagnated in this region, after successive periods of upward growth in recent years.

The Ile de France region now remains the only one in France where house prices remain above those of 2007, due to falls that occurred elsewhere during 2008 and 2009 and the immutable character of prices since this time.

Beyond the Ile de France, FNAIM consider that that the only significant downward movement in prices at a regional level occurred in Nord Pas de Calais (-5.9%) and Brittany (-4.3%), while one region even reported a measurable increase in prices, that being Aquitaine (+1.6%).

The Laforêt group, with 750 branches nationwide, point to a similar picture, with prices only falling on average by 0.4% in the last quarter over Q1. They argue that the big reduction in prices took place at the start of the year, when prices fell by around 5%, and that a further decline in the second quarter was cushioned by attractive rates of interest.

That prompted Laurent Vimont, president of Century 21 to comment somewhat optimistically that “this might indicate that the worst is already behind us”.

A similar view is expressed by Century 21 who state that prices only fell by 0.4% in the first half of the year over the second half of 2011, but that over a year prices had fallen by 2.6%.

However, scratch beneath the surface of the headline figures and it is clear there are the usual significant local disparties, as the following table from Century 21 shows.

The table does have some limitations, notably that the figures are for both apartments and houses combined, and for dwellings averaging in size less than 100m2. So it does not properly reflect the change in prices in larger country properties. However, it is the best we have at the present time.

Regional Property Prices
Region
Price Change Six Months Price Change One Year Average Price m2 Average Purchase Price
Alsace +0.3% +7.9% €1,902 €146K
Aquitaine -7.3% +3% €2,127 €177K
Auvergne -3.4% -0.5% €1,305 €104K
Brittany -1.4% -1.7% €1,991 €159K
Burgundy -3.5% -8.3% €1,240 €111K
Centre +3.9% 0% €,1638 €140K
Champagne-Ardenne +4.4% +1.4% €1,461 €118K
Franche-Comté -4.4% +1.5% €1,703 €143K
Languedoc-Roussillon -2.6% -4.5% €2,176 €162K
Limousin -2.6% -2.3% €1,128 €100K
Lorraine +0.6% -9.1% €1,540 €141K
Lower-Normandy -6.% -10% €1,924 €143K
Midi-Pyrénées -0.4% +1.1% €1,714 €146K
Nord-Pas-de-Calais -2.9% -4.1% €1,701 €152K
Pays-de-la-Loire -6.6% -3.6% €2,088 €172K
Picardy -2.9% -4.1% €1,701 €152K
Poitou-Charentes -13.8% -2.9% €1,685 €163K
PACA +1.3% -0.2% €3,603 €249K
Rhône-Alpes -4% +1% €2,639 €216K
Upper-Normandy -11% -6.2% €1,625 €143K
Source: Century 21

Of the 20 regions in the table, 15 show prices decreases in the past six months, while 5 regions actually saw prices go up. The largest rise in the past six months was in Champagne-Ardenne (+4.4%), while in Poitou-Charentes prices fell by a whopping 13.8%.

These are some big differences in the market, and once you factor in more local variations of rarity and quality, then it is clear that broad average figures need to be used with great caution. The only significant conclusion that can be drawn is that the trend is downwards.

In addition to reports from the estate agents, Credit Agricole also recently issued their latest review of the market.

Although they continue to argue that house prices are substantially overvalued, they do not consider that a collapse of prices is likely.

“The demand for housing will fall”, says Olivier Eluere, housing economist at Credit Agricole. “But it will not collapse because the specific structural characteristics of the French property market continue to have a positive effect, notably due to its ‘safe haven’ status. We are moving more towards a correction, rather slow and gradual, which could last three to four years”.

This report is from http://www.french-property.com/news/french_property_market/house_prices_q2_2012/

A very special visit

Our eldest has recently left home to work on a campsite in Provence and it has been very pleasant. I have cleaned his room, removed vast quantities of old yoghourt pots, spoons, beer bottles and screwed up paper. I have extracted all the rolled up socks and reeking tee shirts from underneath the bed and behind the wardrobe. I emptied all the cigarette butts and papers and fragments of tobacco from the chest of drawers. I organised the bookshelves and installed my craft books. A roll of toilet paper lasts more than a day.
When kids are at home, you feel obliged to lead by example – getting up early, doing housework and not watching telly during the day. We have slipped a little in our standards. We have siestas. Our youngest came back from Uni in the UK and the loo roll still lasts more than a day. The house stays relatively clean and tidy, or so we thought.
Last Friday I came home early in the mid-afternoon. The sudden heat wave, with temperatures of over 35 degrees, had blasted both the locals and the tourists from the streets and the town of Orthez was as dead as Tucson before the shoot-out starts. I was lolling in a very pleasant torpor on the sofa, watching tennis and feeling zapped, when the telephone rang. It was Richard and he was sounding very pleased with himself. He had a new girlfriend and wanted to bring her home for the weekend. I looked around at the front room and was traumatised. The doors looked like they had been eaten by rats – paint loving rats. Dribbles of tea had mysteriously spread themselves generously over a really well-lit wall. The ironing mountain had reached epic heights. We needed to do a ‘big shop’. At least we had loo roll. This was a real quandary. He had only brought home one other girlfriend in all of his nearly 22 years.
We were galvanised into action. Geoff (husband) seized a cloth and bucket and went outside to clean the windows. Our youngest, William, was extracted from his room and given the Hoover to wield. I set to work on the tea dribbles. We have a poele a bois like most of the locals – this is a sturdy wood burning stove and provides an economic means of heating as we have a lot of trees on our land. I knew that all fuel burning systems give out a certain amount of dirt and dust but hadn’t quite realised how much of it makes its way onto the walls. The sunny cream of our front room had turned, over a period of a couple of years, into a rather dingy beige. I started to wipe off the tea stains; they were resistant. I got the wire ball from the kitchen sink and applied it with gusto. The paint came off the wall. Geoff was not pleased.
William, puce with effort and overheated by the lack of good insulation in our loft space which renders the bedrooms on the hot end of toasty in the summer, and arctic in the winter, came downstairs, trailing the Hoover lead behind him. He paused in surprise and asked why on earth I was washing the walls. I replied I was washing off the tea stains and stood back to admire my handiwork. To my horror, the part of the wall I had washed was now restored to sunny yellow and the rest was still beige. I had to spend the next hour washing the rest of the wall and hope no-one noticed that I hadn’t done the part above the telly. William assured me that it just looked like ‘shading’ and our surprise guest probably wouldn’t even notice.
We paused for a cup of tea and pondered sleeping arrangements. We decided they probably did want to share a room (and hoped Grandma wasn’t paying attention from her snowy cloud) and Geoff went up into our loft and found a spare mattress. The spiders had enjoyed the mattress and more cleaning was required.
Richard rang at 11 pm to say they had only got as far as Toulouse (2.5 hours away) so we went to bed and slept fitfully. They arrived sometime in the night and William let them in.
The next day dawned and I saw a small red 205 parked in our courtyard. There were contact lenses in the bathroom and, when I peeked through their door, I saw Richard on the mattress and the girlfriend, a shock of dark hair spread on the pillow, in Richard’s bed. I made a cup of tea and relayed this information to Geoff. William was flat out and not ready to give any interesting further information.
Richard had told us that his new lady had a BTS in Esthetique and had done the makeup for runway models. I went into the bathroom and surveyed my reflection. I looked like the mad cat woman who tried to rent a room with Flanders in one episode of the Simpsons. I recently went to my hairdresser and said I would like my hair to be wavy and not short. I have known Martine for seven years now and we get along very well. She said she would make me look young and beautiful. She said that I should trust her; frankly I should have had misgivings because the last hairdo she gave me made me look like Mireille Mathieu. She very meanly started at the back of my head and by the time she reached the side, it was too late. My hair, which had been pooling in my collar bones, was now just covering my ears. Martine then proceeded to put in the perm rollers and gave me some magazines, full of pictures of women with lovely hairdos who, I presume, were as young and beautiful as I was going to be.
I am now very curly – the effect is of a halo (on a good day). During the night, it often goes completely flat on one side and I have to rewet it to get the ‘desired’ effect. People who haven’t seen me in a while are often surprised.
I quick-showered, wound a towel tightly around my head, put on my dressing gown, and marched into the kitchen. Everyone else was up and dressed, including the new girlfriend, who had also put on full makeup.
She was tiny and looked like a cross between Bjork and Kirsten Dunst. We both felt shy and I escaped upstairs to get dressed. I found Geoff hiding in a bedroom.
Geoff has been studying French for the last two years and has proved surprisingly resistant to both grammar and pronunciation. Now it was crunch time. We went downstairs and Geoff kissed her appropriately and then declared
‘bizarre!’
There was a confused silence as Tiphanie tried to take in what this could possibly mean and Richard took in my new hairstyle.
Geoff regrouped:
‘ah, no! Bonjour I mean….’
They stayed the weekend and it was lovely – we had a day out in San Sebastian, ate tapas in Hondarribia and played cricket. Geoff made a real effort to speak French and we laughed a lot. I am happy to report that Tiphanie ate like a horse, is capable of drinking us under the table and kissed and hugged us goodbye with genuine affection. They have now moved in together… could I become a mother in law? Is it all too early? Will she manage to organise and motivate Richard is a way neither he or we could? Watch this space….

if you want to know about buying property in France, please pop over to my website

http://www.landes-pyreneesproperties.com
or ring on 0033559381991