We have gotten the keys! We are now the official owners of a French house in Gometz-le-Chatel, Essonne, a little town of 2,500 inhabitants, about 30km south of Paris. It was on the eve of the French National Day that the house was transferred to our names—four and a half months after the seller (an …
This was our 8th house visit, and the last stop of our ‘Buying A House in France’ quest. We started our house visits in the middle of January 2021, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, and it took us 2.5 months of active house searching before completing our quest. Mired in four months of French administration before …
After the 4th house visit debacle, we became a pair of more experienced house buyers. On the same day we changed our mind on the 4th house, we visited the 5th and the 6th houses. Would one of them, as the French would say, be un coup de coeur, capture our heart? The Cat House, …
4th House Visit It was the first week of February. We had been actively searching for a house to buy since the start of the year. However, we had only visited three houses so far. Our calls to real estate agents, hoping to make appointments to visit houses, were fruitless: either the houses had already …
Over four months from January to April 2021, we visited a total of eight houses. The following recounts three of our experiences. House Visits 1st House Visit On Saturday, 15 January 2021, we did our first house visit. Since it was our very first visit, we were super excited despite the gray winter sky on …
The pickings on seloger.com continued to be limited in the new year 2021. We were still performing mainly desktop property market research even after the lockdown had been lifted mid-December (but followed by curfew), reason being we had not found any potential ‘candidates’ for house visits. Silviu’s List of Castles Combing through seloger.com was …
I have never lived in a house. When I was in Singapore, I lived with my parents in a condominium, a condominium that my parents have been living in for close to forty years. The reason why my parents have never bought a house in Singapore is because they are not Singapore citizens. In Singapore, …
Our house search was launched right after the summer vacation, in September 2020. We started by poring through the information available on seloger.com, the most popular website used for the rental and purchase of residential properties. Unfortunately, not soon after our house search started, the number of Covid-19 cases returned with a vengeance. The French …
Anyone who has ever bought a house knows that the process is not an easy undertaking. Complications spike when you are buying your first house in a country where you are still trying to get your head around the various antiquated French administrative processes, speaking a language that you are not totally at ease with, …