The stuff of dreams

In two decades selling French property, Peter Elias has seen many changes, mostly for the better, and has helped hundreds of clients achieve their dreams

- Peter Elias

When I first started subscribing to French Property News, little did I realise that the French property market was going to be my world for the next two decades.

The year of the millennium was spent by my wife Bridget and I visiting south-west France, where we had decided to live our dream and escape the rat race of the UK and enjoy quality of life. During that year, we had four viewing visits, of mixed success but certainly not failure as we learned several lessons each time.

If you turn the clock back to 2000, you would find that French estate agents were not yet really into the 21st century, certainly as far as technology and the internet were concerned. Their ‘high street’ premises had dusty, grimy windows, with a collection of dead flies and faded A4-sized property adverts, with bullet point features and an awful photo. Prices were in French francs; the franc was around 10.5 to 11.5 to the pound for most of the year, with a conversion rate of FF655.957 to £100!

There were some progressive agents in France, who had adopted the internet as the way forward to sell property, and also some UK-based agents working in partnership with French agents to offer their houses to the UK market, via magazines such as FPN and the French property exhibitions.

It was rather typical in those days for a property with the ‘wow’ factor to remain as available on the internet after it had sold, used as a carrot to pull in potential buyers. That occasionally happens even now, but generally most agents’ websites are updated regularly.