This week was an education in the French rental system, which got us a bit frustrated.
In the (distant) past when I rented in the UK, the deal was always ‘first come, first served’. The trick was getting your foot in the door before anyone to nab a place to live, so everything moved quickly.
Quite the contrast to how things work in France, but for a good reason…
Traditionally, a tenant in the UK has next-to-zero rights, with tenancies ended without much notice if the landlord changes plans or doesn’t like you much. The power lies with the landlord, and you have to honour your contract once signed without the ability to break it.
However, in France there are far greater protections for the tenant, and they are able to extract themselves from their contract at any time just by giving notice (usually three months for unfurnished properties). It is very difficult for a French landlord to evict even a non-paying tenant. And did I mention there’s no ability to prevent tenants from having pets?
All this comes at a price, which is that rapid acquisition step at the start doesn’t happen. Instead, French landlords take far more time vetting potential tenants, making use of a ‘dossier’ they have prepared with their financial records, and introductory statement and a guarantee from a relative (or, as in our case, a guarantor agency like Smart Garant).
In France, your dossier is your identity. A landlord or agency will rarely even grant a viewing until they have “validated” your dossier fully.
We didn’t fully understand this when we set out on our property search, so ended up getting a bit cross with what felt like delays by Ibanista. In truth, they were pushing pretty hard and have at least 7 enquiries in with landlords.
In our first week after signing up with Ibanista, we spent the whole Easter weekend scouring the property sites and finding potential matches.
It’s fair to say we were far too exacting in our requirements initially. Having stayed in a 90m2 apartment in Strasbourg we used this as our baseline, along with the places we’d identified in our recent scouting trip
We soon had a ‘nudge’ from Ibanista saying we need to either widen our location search or reduce our property size requirement. We chose the former, branching out to focus on smaller towns of villages that are on a local train line within 30 mins of either Colmar or Strasbourg.
We also had 2 more rules:
So we revisited a few properties we’d excluded first time around, and started looking wider.
There is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ place to live. It will inevitably be a compromise, but not one we’d need to live with permanently given the flexibility in the French rental system.
While Ibanista are doing their best to line up virtual viewings, they’ve been honest in saying there is no substitute for seeing a place in person. We’d set our timeline to include 4 weeks in France to view potential places after I finished with work. But the concern was how would we seal the deal on a property that looked good coming up before then?
We’ve decided that Rachel would be best to go ahead alone so long as there were a number of placed to see in person. Going alone would mean the cat is looked after by me, and the costs of the journey/accommodation are kept down.
The plan is to send her off on the train, leaving me with the car (so I don’t starve, since there’s no shop here). If she can’t get to a property easily by train, then we’ve not found the right one.
If we do manage to secure something before I finish work we could scrap the June visit altogether, saving some more money and ensuring our house sale completes to our target timescale.