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Everything you always wanted to know about France |
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Rentals-France Newsletter August 16 1999. Number 3. ====================== I try to give information and provide links to other sites which are accurate and useful. Please write to me with any comments and let me know if there is a special subject you would like mentioned. We are trying very hard to make our sites at http://www.rentals-france.com/ http://www.goto-provence.com/ interesting and helpful. Our policy is to only offer properties in these regions which we know or which a local manager knows personally, which offers good value and which we are confident to recommend. Our client is you, the person or family taking the vacation, not the owner of the property. We do not make any charge to the property owner for putting their home on our site, this is to ensure we are free to act in your interests and to try to make your vacation in France the best possible. If we receive complaints about a property, we remove it from our lists. ====================== ======================
http://www.holi-swaps.com/
Home exchange is an excellent way for the traveler to find good
accommodation. By 'swapping' your home not only can you save
money, but you know you are dealing with like minded folk who
will offer good value and comfort, just as you offer the same to
them. An excellent way to find property for exchange is to use
the services of
http://www.holi-swaps.com/
a well established company who really care about the service
they offer.
====================== ======================= Lots of inquiries are coming in but we still have these two special properties available. The owner of Paraisette tells me he is leaving three bottles of Champagne in the Fridge for the lucky guests.
http://www.rentals-france.com/accommodation/paraisette/
and ========================= Buying a house here is very simple. You make an offer, the seller accepts, you both agree the terms and conditions such as how much, when it is paid, is it subject to a loan, how much deposit etc and the house is secured as yours, the owner cannot sell it elsewhere and you are contracted to buy. It can all be settled in five minutes with a Notaire or a registered estate agent. The legal stuff follows, but this is a fixed price set as a tax. The Notaire (lawyer) acts for both parties and is totally independent. He is paid by the purchaser and until very recently the charges he took varied from about 14% of the price down to about 4% of the price, depending on whether it was commercial, private, new or old property. This has changed and now there are just 2 taxes, private at 6% and commercial at 4%, (I am waiting for more confirmation of the exact figures and requirements) a private house which is purchased for rental is classified as commercial, so this is a big change and could help start an increased demand for property. There are no restrictions on who can buy property here, anyone from anywhere in the world may buy a house in France, (the only exception may be a person who deserts from the Foreign Legion). The Notaire is the biggest tax collector in France, they are, in effect, civil servants. When we purchased our crumbling ruin of medieval stones here in Nizas, we thought the delays may lose us the property, so we swallowed hard and consulted a Notaire, we sat for several hours while he phoned and consulted his colleagues, finally he smiled and said everything was OK. I then, very nervously, asked how much this consultation had cost me and he looked most surprised and said it cost nothing, it was just part of his job, I like this system. The Notaire can also help you find your perfect property, they are told of all sales and auctions in their region, they often have notices in their offices like a real estate agent, all this is free advice. Taxes are due on January 1st, so if possible buy the property on January 2nd and you will have a tax free year for the tax d'habitation. There are two taxes paid on a house, taxe fonciere which is a tax on the land and tax d'habitation which is, as it sounds, a habitation tax. The local Mairie (Town Hall) will give you full details. The Mairie in any town or village is very important for you if you are buying property in France, the secretary in the Mairie knows everything and everyone. If you find a village you like, go to the Mairie and ask their advice, they can tell you about new plans, sewers, roads, building permits, they used to tell you who owned which parcel of land or which house but this information is a little more difficult to get now. The Mairie also sell properties. It may seem strange to most people, but in France property is often just abandoned by a family when the owner dies. Afer a few years this then becomes the property of the Town and the Mairie will often sell it, sometimes at a very low price. In Nizas last year a small house was sold for $1500 by the Mairie (not a misprint one thousand five hundred dollars). Unfortunately I did not know about it I was too busy mixing concrete or something. You just have to ask. (more next week) ========================= Driving in France should be a pleasure, the roads are well made and safe, there is not much traffic, except on holiday weekends and the drivers are generally considerate. However there are a few things that defy all logic (except French logic). Signposts, they all seem to indicate the town a long way after the one you want. Often the town marked is 200 to 300 km away and the one you are looking for is 20km away. The logic behind this is typically French, the attitude is "Well everyone knows where the nearby town is, but they may not know where the distant town is", by "everyone" the French signpost maker means him and his family who have lived there all their lives and have no intention of going to the distant town anyway. The moral is get a map. The yellow Michelin maps with a scale of 1cm equals 2km is the best series. An excellent free route planner is on a site at You may need to know the department number when you write in the names of the towns, (again everyone in France knows these of course), there are 95 of them, you are expected to know these by heart, we are in Herault 34, Provence is 84, Paris center 75, a good Michelin map will list them all. Regarding department numbers, the road tax is different in each department, so each year all car rental companies register their cars in the cheapest one. By looking at your car plate anyone can tell if it is a hire car. This year the cheapest department is 51, this is always the last two numbers on the registration plate. The problem is that all the people with a less than honest reason for knowing which car is a hire car can also tell, so be careful and never leave valuables in the car and keep any handbag or camera away from a door or window even when you are in the car and driving. ========================== Outpost.com is the place to shop for Computer Products on the Web! http://www.outpost.com/index.html They offer over 160,000 products, superior customer service, and FreeShipping on all domestic items with their TruePrice policy! Outpost.com also has one of the premier affiliate programs on the Internet, The Outpost Affiliate Network. If you have a website...The Outpost Affiliate Network is the place to earn money on line. Outpost.com: Hardware, Software, Answers! http://www.outpost.com/index.html To top it all off, Outpost.com has an auctions site where you can bid on computer products and win for low, low prices. OutpostAuctions is at http://www.outpostauctions.com ========================= If you have read the first two newsletters, you may have guessed that I am not a great fan of France Telecom, their system works, but it is horrifically expensive, I mentioned last week that this is the reason that cyber cafes seem expensive to visitors.
There is a link on our site at This weeks tip, the dialing tone in France sounds just like the engaged tone in the UK and some other countries. One guest said they had tried to phone us all week and that we were always busy, I checked and then tried from their phone, all was well, they had thought that the dialing tone was the busy tone and had hung up every time. It solved a problem for me as I had wondered who had kept hanging up on us. ========================= ========================= Most picking is by machine, hand picking is one of the hardest jobs on this earth, no farmer here would employ a 'dude' ranch person even if they paid the farmer for the week. It has been tried and failed, now the quality grapes and the production is too valuable. Teams of hand pickers used to come from Spain, now it is eastern Europe, pay is $5 per hour for a 10 hour day starting at 7.00 am, you are bent double most of the time, unless you are used to it a beginner very rarely gets to the second day. The best thing is to come and watch and drink last years harvest to make room for this years. ========================= No one can say for sure when our house was built. The only record is in the 10th century when the fortified tower in front of our house is first recorded. Due to centuries of wars there are very few written records left in France. As recently as the last war records were destroyed to protect families here. But for sure the main walls of our house have been here at least one thousand years as they are the defensive walls of the village and are six foot thick. When we bought the house five years ago, we drew up some plans to try to work our what to do. Typical of most old village houses, the house is not a tidy rectangle, but a maze of corners and overlapping boundaries with the neighboring properties. When we had made the plans we found in one corner that the wall seemed to be over 10 yards thick. This was odd, so we chipped away some stones and found a hole, shining a torch in we could see a sealed up room full of rubbish. I had dreams of treasure, hidden manuscripts, secret tunnels (there are lots of those in this area) untold mysteries. When we made a bigger opening we found a walled up doorway about 4ft high. Eventually we made and entrance and I stepped into this room, a round chamber about 10ft round and with a beautifully made domed ceiling. Who knows perhaps I was the first person in centuries to have been there. In fact I was probably the first person in about 80 years as an old man in the village knew about it and there was nothing but old rubbish, horse collars and a bicycle wheel there. However, no one could tell me what it was. Being a round room, the first thought was a well which had been filled in, everyone in the village had a theory, olive mill, store room, grain silo, secret passage entrance. Architects said it was clearly for defensive purposes, farmers said it was clearly a farming utility. I started to clear the floor and found that I was excavating tons of old rocks, I found a lot of pottery which is similar to that in the museums dated around 13th to 16th centuries, so it seems to have been filled in about 500 years ago. Why was it built, why was it filled in? After 3 years and 200 tons of rubble later we have found the answer, it definitely was not a well, olive press or defensive. No secret tunnels (yet). I may tell you the answer next week. The clues, the chamber is about 30 ft high there was a vaulted roof with a trap door in, there was a small door into this chamber about half way up the wall, there was a lead grill at the bottom for a drain and a flagged floor it could have been built any time between the 10th to 16 centuries. The really strange thing for me is that no one is really interested except me and our guests. Although there are only two known examples of this 'thing' in the South of France and this is the only known example in a house of this 'thing' anywhere, I asked the universities and public architects for their comments, not one person expressed interest or concern that I was excavation a medieval monument. The reason is that many of the old houses here are living museums, all homes in these French villages have secrets and they are just taken for granted, in a nice way this is part of the charm and the magic of the South of France. ======================== |