The Housing Crisis in France - Part 1

We have been here for seven weeks now, so in terms of finding our long term home, where are we up to?  Presently, we are living in Montpellier in a pleasant one bedroom apartment with a roof terrace, very close to Place de la Comédie which has its advantages (it's in the heart of it all) and clear disadvantages (it's busy, dirty and noisy in the heart of it all).  Coming from Australia we are accustomed to plenty of space, so whilst a one bedroom apartment in the thick of it is fine for now, ultimately we want a home where we can welcome guests, potter in the garden, light a fire for the winter nights, have a study or music room, that sort of thing.  

We decided that renting a place for the first year, say, would be the best thing. That way we wouldn't have commited ourselves too much to any one place and we could use it as a base to research our options and find the perfect place to settle. Plus, French rents are signifcantly less than Australian rental prices.  Makes a lot of sense, right? 

We started off looking on seloger.com, the French equivalent of realestate.com.au, and found about a thousand properties to rent in the Montpellier area. Great! Then we specified we were only interested in properties 60 M2 or over. That cut the properties down to about a hundred. Then we specified outside space - a garden, courtyard or terrace. That left us with four places. Four. And we hadn't even limited the budget! 

Undaunted, we thought we would take a look at these properties.  This is when we found that renting a home in France - a permanent rental not a holiday home - is really difficult. And it's become more difficult since we did our intial research last year.   You see, in France it's very common for someone to rent a home their entire life, as no one really has a burning need to own a house or an apartment. This means a contract between tenant and landlord can go on for twenty odd years. French law makes it very hard indeed for a landlord to evict a non-rent-paying tenant and impossible to evict one during the months November through March, due to hardship / winter stipulations. Thus, offering to pay a year's rent up front is of no interest to a landlord or agency - what about the other nineteen years you might possibly reside there rent free and unevictable?? Also, letting agencies have taken out insurance against being sued by disgruntled, out-of-pocket landlords to whom they have referred dodgy tenants, thus any letting prospect now needs to suit very stringent letting stipulations. 

Needless to say, we don't suit.

Furthermore, French houses are not equipped in the way we are used to. Most of them don't have a kitchen, just a sink, and the tenant is meant to supply the rest of the kitchen fittings, because he will most likely stay there for twenty years and will want to choose his own. Something we are not used to, needless to say.   Que faire?  Well, time became of the essence as our Montpellier apartment lease is over at the end of June, and being homeless in France over the summer would be very difficult given that the whole country goes into 'closed down for the holidays' mode.  Rather than struggling to build up rental dossiers, purchase entire kitchens including white goods, put our household shipment (arriving soon from Australia!) into storage and go without internet and telephone for several months, we looked for a holiday rental to see us through. Not easy at this time of year, and we were getting rather desperate.  Just as Alex was talking of camper vans and tents (rather too excitedly, I have to say) our luck turned.  Unexpectedly, a perfectly suitable place came up in the same Residence des Pins we lived in last year, and we gratefully took it. 

This does not solve our long term challenges nor is it exanding our horizons, since we are familiar with Clermont l'Herault, but it means we will have a very nice summer!  It means we will have a garden for pottering, a fireplace for wintertime, room to welcome guests and a lovely base to do more research into the Languedoc and Provence and hopefully find our future home.  And that can't be bad....in fact it's vachement bien!