Still House Hunting in France, Online
The pickings on seloger.com continued to be limited in the new year 2021. We were still mainly doing desktop property market research, even after the lockdown had been lifted mid-December. (A curfew followed, though.) The reason was simple: our house hunting in France had not yet found any potential ‘candidates’ for house visits.
Silviu's List of Castles
Combing through seloger.com was our all-time favourite activity. It’s not an exaggeration to say that both Silviu and I checked the website regularly, very regularly…every few hours. That was despite our subscription to email alerts for new postings.
We played with the search criteria settings, compared houses and monitored the changes in prices. On top of that, we tried justifying the reasons for the price differences for seemingly similar houses. We even had an Excel list titled “Silviu’s list of castles” where we put down the houses with potential and their pros and cons. You could call us, especially Silviu, house price experts in the Orsay area.
Silviu’s Newly Discovered Talent
On seloger.com, each post displays an average of five photos and lists the key features of the house. The listing gives only the name of the town (of course, not the precise location). It would be quite hard for an ordinary bloke or lass to pinpoint the exact location.
House Hunting in France with Google Maps
Silviu is not an ordinary bloke. His general interest in maps, keen sense of direction and analytical mind, combined with our desperation, turned the house-hunting quest into a challenge for him. Silviu gleaned clues from the photos, like the colour of the roof or facade and the size of the land. Even a nearby parking lot or an inflatable garden pool could give a house away. Then, with the help of Google Maps photos, he was able to pinpoint the location of the house (up to 90% success).
Indeed, his obsession had saved us some time. Once, we saw some photos of a house, which met most of our criteria, and seemed to be surrounded by a lot of greenery—right up our alley. After some digging on the internet, Silviu found the house. The house was indeed surrounded by greenery. It was actually located in the middle of nearby woods. True, there was a road that a car could use, but it stopped a few hundred metres from the house. We would have to walk the rest of the way on trails. Silviu and I love nature, and like running in the forest. But having to do that at least twice a day, likely lugging our laptops or groceries, is not very practical.
Nevertheless, if Silviu ever wants to switch careers, he can consider working for a real estate agent. His job would be to locate competitors’ house listings.
In the DNA
Silviu’s talent runs in the family. A while back, Silviu showed my mother-in-law some photos of a house we were interested in. He only mentioned to her the name of the town, that the house was situated on the river bank and it was next to a parking lot. Of course, soon after, she shocked us (yes, even Silviu) by revealing to us the exact location of the house.
Compromis Signé
Our biggest complaint about seloger.com is that it allows real estate agents to continue to list their properties on the website even if the properties have already been spoken for. What it means for us is that these “taken” houses would still pop up in our search results.
There was many a time when our growing bubble of excitement—possibility of at last having found our ideal house as we swiped fervently through the stack of photos—was brusquely burst after reading the sign “Compromis Signé” (Pre-Sales Agreement has been signed) slapped across one of the listed photos. A “Compromis Signé” house means that a pre-sale contract with suspension clauses (e.g. unable to obtain financing) has been entered into. If everything goes smoothly, which is most of the time, the listed house is basically “off-the-market.”
If the sign appeared as the first photo, we could skip this particular listing and look at the next available house in the search results, thus saving time. Oftentimes, it was only after browsing the third, the fourth, or the fifth photo that we realised that the house had been taken.
Bugbear in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse
There are two main reasons why an agent wants to maintain his “Compromis Signé” house on seloger.com.
- One reason is that the offer might not convert into a final sale due to reasons such as the inability to secure a bank loan. In that case, the agent needs to look for another buyer.
- The second reason (and likely in most cases) is that the listing with “Compromis Signé” slapped across the photo allows the real estate agent to show off how well he is doing in his business.
There was this particular real estate agent in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, a town 10km away from Orsay (further from Paris) whom we found especially irritating. The houses in that town were generally cheaper than those in Orsay and we did indeed consider moving there, after discovering the paucity of supply in Orsay. Ever since we began our search, we noticed that 9 out of 10 of his listings were “Compromis Signé.” He had burst a few of our excitement bubbles.