Another Fine Mess

I am taking stock on working with real estate sales – in 15 months I have responded to 130 serious enquiries, this has generated over 2,000 email exchanges and resulted in 5 sales – this is just under a 4 percent success rate (according to the largest agency group, FNAIM, the average is about 3 percent) and averaged about 8 hours work per enquiry, a sale has taken an average of 208 hours of work to complete.

At an average income net (after shared commissions etc) earning for a sale after tax of 3000 euro and after fixed deductions and social charges, I am working for 8 euro an hour net.

Then deduct from this my operating costs, mileage and fuel – (over 6,000 km) plus office expenses etc – I am effectively making 500 euro a month profit before tax for an average of a 32 hour week and no holidays.

I am also dealing with a vast dysfunctional tribe of local agents, many of who are acting like starved rats in a cage – in addition the system of sales in France is entrenched in the 17th century with no central listing system and a free-for-all of numerous agents mandated to sell every property, Internet bucket-shops, unlicensed ex-pats offering “finders-services” plus the owner all competing for the same clients.

Any intelligent client will now use the Internet to find the property they want from all the agents listings and then go direct to the owner to buy from them and cut all agents out completely. By using Google maps and careful searches, just about any property listed by an agent, no matter how carefully they try to obscure their sparse information. A property can be found and the owner identified using freely available Internet services. At present this can take a couple of hours research, but I am finding many tools to speed this up and soon there will be sites offering this service. It is a no-brainer for a buyer to do this as the commission charged by the immobiler is at least 6 percent of the selling price and this can be from 12,000 euro minimum on the price of an average house, which the owner never sees and which they can discount to a direct buyer.

I would be delighted to work for 5,000 euro an hour, because that is what researching with Google is worth to a buyer.

I could go on listing the problems, perils and pitfalls of this work – but enough is enough.

Tags: real estate, estate agents, french immobilier, property in france, french property