NEED A FRIENDLY EAR WHILST SEARCHING FOR FRENCH PROPERTY?

WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP....

We are offering entirely free and informal advice and help to anyone who is setting out on the daunting road towards buying a home in France (particularly the La Rochelle region)....because we've done it and we know how tricky it can be!  We are always happy to answer questions via email, and all we ask in return is that you consider staying in our holiday apartment in La Rochelle and use it as a base from which to explore the region for property. If you do stay, we invite all guests in to us (we are right next door to the apartment) for a drink or a meal and a chat where you can ask any questions (however stupid you think they are!). If we don't know the answers, we have a "team" of people we know - estate agents, financial advisors, mad friends from La Rochelle's Irish pubs, etc., who will. We can even set up estate agents appointments, and bully them a bit on your behalf (!), act as interpreters, and so on. We are not a company and so don't charge anything above and beyond the apartment rental if you come, but we have found this informal service to have been quite popular since we started doing it when the season of 2003 summer tourists started to drop off. More details of us below, but email jeremyandlorraine@sensorypulse.co.uk or call us at home (+33 5 46 35 64 80) straightaway if we can help.

We are Lorraine and Jeremy, a couple living now extremely happily in beautiful La Rochelle after two quite tough years having made the decision to throw in the towel on our manic life as teachers in Bristol and bring all our possessions, pets and life to France to seek that "better existence". We headed straight down to the Vendee region, and bought a lovely place there that needed quite a lot of work. Being completely consumed with this for six months, it didn't strike us that the Vendee was really a little bit quiet for us: we are musicians and artists and need regular contacts to keep that side going.

So we put the house in Vendee that we'd really fallen in love with up for sale and decided to try and find something (inevitably) smaller in La Rochelle. To cut a long story short, all of these things worked out for us, with some considerable effort! In early 2003, we sold the Vendee house to a lovely couple from Manchester. We did this as a private sale via the internet, but had so much interest in it, that we began to seriously think of setting up a small estate agent in the Vendee/Charente Maritime area. However, France requires all sorts of qualifications and experience to do this - you can't simply set up an internet site and starting helping people to sell. Pity, as the impression we have had again and again is that people get nothing of the service they require from estate agents in Western France, both British and French.

Meanwhile, we'd found a new home in La Rochelle, and immediately divided it up such that we had one part of it that we could rent out as a small holiday apartment, to keep us going financially! Adding together all the various strands of our lives in mid-2003, we hit upon another idea.

We remembered how nightmarish the process of property hunting in a foreign country can be when we first bought here. We stretched our minds back to that time, and it struck us how delighted we'd have been to have the chance to speak with someone who'd done the same as we were trying to do sometime before - someone who'd been through it and lived to tell the tale. Someone who'd encountered all the same holes as we were afraid of falling down, and who'd got over them without ending up in financial or legal difficulty. Someone we could email whenever questions came up, and even better still, a new friend we could go and stay with in France whilst searching and bend their oreille! Hence the "come and stay in our apartment and use us for help" idea.

There are some other places in the village where our house was and in this general area, which are for sale but not on the internet - the French sometimes fail to harness the enormous numbers of foreigners looking for places in the region...they simply put out a For Sale sign and hope for the best. Meanwhile, thousands of Brits/Irish/ etc. are trawling the internet for their dream homes. These are the kinds of things we know about from experience and can advise on.

Plus, if you stay with us during the Autumn and Winter, you can take advantage of the low season rates and possibly get your house purchase up and running in time to sign the completion deal by the spring or early summer. Click HERE for details of the apartment and rates, or here to contact us via email.

Jeremy Millington and Lorraine Reilly

Address

1 avenue du Val de Loire

17140 Lagord

France

Email jeremy@sensorypulse.co.uk

Home phone 0033 5 46 35 64 80

Mobile 0033 6 32 90 50 57