Our search started
on the internet while we were touring India at the end of 2005
(see India and About 2005/6), but
getting details of properties we were interested in proved
problematic, mainly because the estate agents didn't want to
give more details than the very basic description, they just
wanted you to go and see it for yourself. Kind of
difficult from India. So we waited until a week or so
before we got back from India and made some appointments to view
some properties in Brittany. Our first visit
to Brittany in early March, 2006, gave us a good grounding in
dealing with estate agents and what to look for when viewing a
property, but we didn't see anything that really grabbed us. For
our second we had more time in France and also more time to
arrange viewings in Brittany and Normandy. One
of the main problems we had with the details available on the
web site we were using was that they were very brief, e.g. 'Old
farmhouse with 1 acre of land' and a picture or two. To
conceal the actual location of the property and so stop us from
trying to find it through other estate agents, the location
given was the name of a village that the property was within a
radius of up to 30km of. Not very useful when trying to
find it on a map! I wont mention the actual website we
went through, but I would recommend using agents that actually
have the property listed themselves and not on behalf of other
estate agents. The one we used didn't have any detailed
information about the properties we were interested in, but just
arranged an appointment with the French estate agent and had no
further involvement except to collect a commission if we bought
the property. It's difficult for us to recommend anyone in
particular, the company we went through was British based but I
wouldn't tar all British based companies with the same brush, we
did view a couple of properties through some British based
companies and they had their own representative in France who
showed us the property and were very forthcoming when we asked
for extra details. I read
numerous advice columns on the internet about how to go about
looking for a property in France, and I guess the same rules
apply wherever you want to buy, but when you're looking for
something cheap, then you need to be flexible and open
minded. What you need to do is decide on the most
important attributes that you want, for us it was simply
something cheap with at least an acre of land, and try not to be
swayed when you see something that doesn't meet you most
important criteria. Having said that, you also need to be
flexible to some degree because when you might very well come
across a property which has attributes you had not even
considered. Because we were quite open to the type of
property and at various times were interested in properties as
diverse as an old factory, a school and even an old church, it
was quite difficult with estate agents who thought we should be
able to tell them exactly what we were looking for. Our
approach was to find all the properties that sounded interesting
and print out the limited details available on the internet,
then group them by how interested we were in them based on our
limited criteria. We also contacted the relevant estate
agents and tried to get more detailed info, but 90% of the time
there was no further information available. It was interesting
how many properties we kept going back to even though they
didn't meet our prime requirement, at least an acre of land.
Some properties tempted us to perhaps rethink the acre of land
rule, but we wanted the land to grow our own food, so in the end
we reluctantly put those properties on the rejected pile. Having
compiled our list of hopefuls, the next step was to make
appointments to view. This was when we found out that some
of them were already sold, or couldn't be viewed because they
were under offer. We had properties spread over Brittany
and into West Normandy, so we also had to juggle appointments to
make sure were weren't criss-crossing the country from day to
day. The viewings were quite
exciting, we managed to make most of our appointments on time
and were taken to the properties by the various agents, usually
following them in our van as they led the way. Some
properties we had arranged to see had been sold or were under
offer by the time we got to the appointment, so we were not
allowed to view, in which case the agents would suggest
alternatives. Because we were mostly looking at ruins, it
wasn't difficult to arrange short notice viewings, especially as
we already had an appointment with the agent. Towards
the end of our second trip to France, we came across Le Vivier
which I immediately fell for. Rita thought it was a great place
but obviously too much work, although at least the main house
had a roof of sorts on it. I could easily see myself
living there, but we still had a few properties to look at,
including one or two on our favourites list. The
only other serious contender was a property we looked at a day
or so later, it had a lot of potential, but to me Le Vivier was
the better option as it had more buildings already in place,
whereas the other property only had two buildings and we were
told we would be unlikely to get permission to build new
buildings as it was close to a working farm. It
was on our way back to the ferry at Roscoff that we made the
decision to put an offer in, and so we did. The
story continues on The Purchase page. | 
