A carefully planned French house-hunting trip

After scouring the internet for what seemed like months we finally had an agreed list of properties we wanted to look at. France is an awfully large country so we decided to limit our search to places we could reasonably easily get to from England - initially we wanted to look in Normandy, Brittany and Poitou-Charentes but in the end we decided on just Brittany and Normandy as Poitou-Charentes was just that bit too far south of the ports.

We planned our holiday home search with precision !

There's a lot of UK companies advertising French properties and as we weren't really sure of the precise area we wanted to buy in, we looked at all their websites !

By eliminating the properties that were too far from the sea, those that the house needed too much work doing to it or those that we just didn't like the look of, we found 6 UK companies that were offering properties that we wanted to visit:

• Francophiles
• Sinclair Overseas Property Network
• VEF
• Kiriel Property
• Holiday Houses in Brittany
• French Discoveries

Francophiles and Sinclair actually act as an introduction agency to the French estate agency so we ended up with 9 different estate agencies to visit. With a bit of jiggling around of dates and appointments we had the itinerary planned for a rather full week of property seaching in September 2003.

The Grand French house-hunting tour

These two Autoroute maps show the properties we'd identified that we wanted to view. In the end we found that many of the properties we'd seen had either been sold or were in an appalling condition ...