I have written about this before, but a recent letter from an owner asking why there had been no interest in their property prompted me to write this reply…
Hi,
Your situation is a good example of the problems with estate agencies in France. In fact none of the agencies you have approached is truly motivated to sell your house, apart from their time to talk to you in the first place, to add it to their portfolio is a minor investment for them and basically, the more houses they add the better it looks for the buyers they can attract. Having a big portfolio would seem to offer a better choice, where in fact many of their properties are overpriced and they are only going to sell the properties which are at the “right” price offering a correct value.
I have often seen agents quickly flicking though large lists of properties with causal remarks like “too expensive” or “not nice” or just a brief “no, not that one” .
Agents will sell what they get most money from for their time, in a flat market they have no incentive to drop prices or advise their owners as they do not have many buyers anyway. In a booming market they have no incentive to get the best price as the quicker they sell the better and the difference of commission between 250,000 and 300,000 is not worth their wasting time on, as they will be working harder mainly for the owner.
I am not involved in property in your region and cannot answer for the state of the market in Perigord – my region, Languedoc has a good demand as there is huge investment for infrastructure, transport, employment and the official plan is to increase the population significantly, by at least 50 percent – it is also the most popular tourist area now and is ideal for retirement as well as attracting new enterprise – so land is being released for building.
Your region has had steady demand for a long time now, but there is no logical reason to assume significant growth and prices may have become overheated.
I can understand what the father and son of “the old school” are saying – wait long enough and someone will buy it – but this can be many years and is not a commercially viable position for you.
From what you are telling me I can only deduce that you are asking a higher price than your property can be seen to be worth. This is evident from the viewers you have had and the exposure and viewings from french-property.com.
Another factor may be that the house is not finished – far fewer people are looking for “projects” now, and those that ate want to buy them as you did, at a bargain price. You say the house is half finished, which means half of the work is yet to be done and this will scare off many more buyers now who are leaning the huge costs of renovation from the Internet stories and television programs. The average of buyers is tending to increase as well so renovation projects are no where near as popular as they were ten years ago.
I personally detest VEF and I will have nothing to do with them.
My advice is to use the portals like www.french-property.com www.primelocation.com and www.green-acres.com – advertise for 295,000 for a month and reduce by 5000 euro a month until you get serious interest, unlike dealing with an immobilier on a mandat, you are not obliged to take an offer at the price you advertise.
Back to my first paragraph, the problem with French agencies is that they all do a very bad job of presenting and selling a property because they are all competing with each other and, most importantly, the owner – the last thing they want to do is to advertise so that a viewer of their advert can identify the property and then knock at your door , or even so other agents can find it and ask for a direct mandat to sell.
The answer is for only one agent to have an exclusive mandat for a reasonable period – say six to nine months – the property can then be extensively advertised and the property can be syndicated through all other agents on a shared commission basis.
In this way a property should be professionally presented and it will prevent all the millions of duplicate advertising of the same property (sometimes at different prices) – plus anyone can go to any agent and through the network and database all local properties can be identified and offered.
This is how it works in the USA and the UK – but it will take a radical change of attitude for the French to adopt this system.
I am working on some new Internet community ideas which will certainly offer a good alternative for sellers and buyers – but I need some technical help as I am too busy selling (successfully) houses at the moment in Languedoc.
Hope this helps
best wishes
Tony