The Property Ladder
Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 11:08 pmCategory: The Vendée, Useful & Sensible Stuff
And so our season has come to an end. More or less.
For the overseas visitor, the Vendée is not really a winter destination. Ski-ing is pretty much unheard of, due to a staggering absence of hills. The Vendée is so flat that for an entire département of 600,000 people we only have one escalator. My kids can be very cheap to entertain: I take them up to Nantes and find them some escalators to ride while I go and do whatever it is I have to do.
It’s not that the Vendée is featureless. Quite the contrary: it is a very attractive part of France, albeit one with a very gentle topography. The highest point in the département is only 232m above sea level.
So outside of the period April – October we get very few bookings in the gites, and those we do get tend to be from groups of French guests who are looking for somewhere big (we have a pair of properties that can be taken together to sleep 20+ and has space to allow everyone to eat together) for family “dos.” But these are the odd weekend here and there. New Year is also pretty popular, but for most of this period we are left to our own devices and pass the time decorating, repairing and generally tending the business.
As part of this tending process, we have taken it into our heads to expand. The thing is, property prices around here have taken a good dip, possibly more so than in some other parts of France. The interest from people looking for second homes – be they Parisians or be they proper foreigners from other countries – has dwindled to practically nil, and while there is still a steady stream of migration from other parts of France (the Vendée being just about the best place to live and work in the country, though I will admit to a tiny bias perhaps), the interest here is for new-builds, not renovation projects.
Had someone have told me a couple of years ago that second homers were the driver behind the market for older homes in the Vendée I simply wouldn’t have believed them: I didn’t think there were that many of them. Seems I was wrong.
Either way, the market for fixer-uppers has slumped and for those in a position do so, this looks like a good time to go shopping.
So we are. We’re identified a prospect that could make a five, six or even seven bedroom gite with private pool and are in the process of negotiation. The first stage is to convince our bank that they really want to lend us the money. This can be difficult: a gite rentals business on a scale that can support a family is still a comparative rarity and actuarial tables or whatever they use to assess business risks don’t tend to include such things. Neither do VAT regulations, not with any degree of clarity, but that is a tale for another day.
The upshot is that banks are not always mad keen to hand over flipping great wedges of cash for foreigners to buy properties to rent out in a market that they (the banks) don’t understand.
But we’ve done seven seasons now, supporting ourselves from a business built on our own money and we’ve not had to sell our kidneys to organ traffickers to make ends meet, so the bank are at least willing to listen to us. We went to see our adviser at Crédit Agricole last Friday to present the business plan, which, it seems he liked. We now await the decision from his management.
One of the reasons we moved here was to downshift, take life a little easier and to get away from the intense business environment which had been our lot since leaving university. We don’t need to add another gite, but it seems we can’t help ourselves…
November 20th, 2009 06:33
Well, Jon, it seems that all generations of the very best families are attracted to escalators of one kind or another. It strikes me that you have an opportunity here to think totally out of the box. Have you considered designing a fit-for-purpose custom-new-build that gives the outward appearance of centuries of neglect and idyllic rustic dilapidation? I’m thinking of modern and five stars on the inside, with an exterior facade replete with simulated decay (dry rot, cracked stonework, rusty pitchforks, cobwebs, that sort of thing) which screams out for either demolition or renovation – with a heavy bias to the former. Think of the fun you can have with local planning officers, not to mention the banks! If you bring the media in to track your application, there’s every chance you’ll be the inspiration behind an international blockbuster comedy hit and make a fortune. It’s just a thought, and I visualised the end product when I looked in the mirror this morning. Bon chance!
November 20th, 2009 18:01
‘… we can’t help ourselves.’
We have some friends with three gites who have the same affliction, Jon. They had One gite when we met them a few years ago, and have alternated constantly between Enormifying and Building Another.
They are terrifyingly dynamic – visualising a palace in a pig shed, and whizzing it into success. When George proudly showed them the tiling he’s done to make an ignored room in our house useable, they immediately came up with a zillion money-making things we Really Ought To Do with it.
Had we But a zillionth of their Whizz…
Jolly good luck with the bank’s decision.
November 20th, 2009 18:36
Round here Parisians are considered proper foreigners, and indeed far less desirable due to them being snobby, bad tippers, arrogant, have no idea how to drive on mountain roads, have even less of an idea how to ski (yet have very nice jackets – all the gear, no idea…) and are extremely, very, utterly rude.
Good luck with the bank!
November 20th, 2009 21:45
Good luck! I hope that everything falls into space for you! xx
November 22nd, 2009 10:56
Best wishes for success with the bank and I do hope your project succeeds.
November 22nd, 2009 12:37
Good luck with the project. Why not put in an escalator for novelty value? Something to keep the kiddies quiet if the weather is bad.
November 22nd, 2009 13:23
Thank you all for your comments. We should have an answer in a couple of weeks. The property is pretty old – first half 19th C – and hasn’t really had much done to it since the 1970s, so you can imagine the decor. Still, a couple of (spurious) exposed oak beams and some stonework should up the charm level a notch or two.
I particularly like the central heating boiler which a wood fired affair with a huge door that uses logs a foot thick and three long. I’m not sure that gite guests will be entirely comfortable with this, so I’ll be selling that!
We’ll be doing much more of the work ourselves this time as the last six years have made us rather more handy and experienced than we were.
I am fairly chomping at the bit
November 22nd, 2009 19:48
Are you sure that boiler didn’t come from our place? It resembles horribly closely the monster that used to live in our basement….you used to feel like a stoker on the itanic…
November 22nd, 2009 19:48
Are you sure that boiler didn’t come from our place? It resembles horribly closely the monster that used to live in our basement….you used to feel like a stoker on the Titanic…
November 24th, 2009 23:09
You know, Fly, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be able to sell it on. Grotesque and huge though it might be, I reckon it must be pretty effective. All I have to do is buy the place and it’s mine.