7 Tips on Buying a Gite in France

These 7 tips will help you successfully buy your dream gîte in France

Many people dream of moving to France, buying a gîte and living the good life, French style.   So what should you look for when buying a gîte in France?  

Duncan Ritson-Elliott, owns and operates the beautiful farmhouse gîte, Gîte Dordogne in the remote Dordogne countryside, as well as advising on the best methods to buy your own gîte in France. He has first hand experience in buying a gîte in France and shares his excellent tips with us here.

When you think of owning and running a gîte in France, you probably have vivid mental images of a country idyll. Maybe a beautiful blend of ‘Cider with Rosie’, ‘The Darling Buds of May’ or ‘A Year In Provence’ running through your head, or maybe sitting on the patio in the sun, sipping wine in the dappled shade of flowering wisteria.

Owning a gîte in France is a dream for many.  But for the serious-minded gîte property purchaser, it then becomes a reality. Unfortunately, many people miss out on some of the essential information on buying a gîte before they take the leap.

You’ve probably thought through some of the obvious things to consider when buying your gîte, but here are 7 lesser-known tips we came across when we bought our dream gîte in France.

7 Tips on Buying a Gîte in France

1.  Don't fall in love with the first place you view

Lots of people do this.  Struck by how gorgeous the place is and how much cheaper than an equivalent property in England (or indeed other countries) would be, they jump in with both feet. I admire bold people.  But just hold back a little while.

My mum made this exact mistake 8 years ago. She saw a lovely place, fell in love with it, feared someone else would snap it up and bought it pretty much on the spot.  She still loves it, but she knows absolutely that she paid over the odds for it.   With a slower approach and with more negotiation, she could have bought the same property for about 50k Euros cheaper – or another property similar.

2.  Hone your criteria

The other problem with falling in love with the first house or gîte you see is that you probably haven’t honed down your criteria, or your list of requirements.  When we started looking we fell in love with a few places, but mindful of the “don’t give in to love at first site” rule, we looked at a few more.  And in so doing, realised that for example, we really didn’t want big land if it was too steep.  

I remember one property we looked at and loved - stunning house but was on a lot of quite steep land.  We had serious discussions and getting huge diggers in to level, sculpt and terrace a few acres to give the kids a sports field. Then we had a bit of a scolding chat with ourselves and realised, hang on, this is ridiculous – this place does not tick enough of our requirements, so keep looking and find a place without steep land.

The more places you see, the more you will get in touch with your own criteria, as you get to think through the physical reality of living in such a gîte.

3.  Funnel down from all France to a local area

You’ll probably either start with a general desire to own your dream home in France without being specific about what area you want, or you’ll want to buy a gîte near where you holidayed and loved. It is a good move to start your search broad, and to then narrow the search.  Start with all of France and then funnel down to a certain area you like.

Different areas have different biases, amenities, accents (make sure you can understand the locals!), schools if necessary, and locals approach to foreigners.  Our neighbours now are delightful and very helpful; equally, in other regions, I’ve previously experienced the cold shoulder of xenophobia.  

It is worth doing the homework before you get stuck in an unfriendly town or with a difficult neighbour.  If your French is up to it, a café or bar is a good place to find a local to chat with and pick their brains, and ask them for help and advice – most decent people love the opportunity to help.  If a few attempts to talk with locals finds them unhelpful, you might want to reconsider the area.

Equally, consider what weather you like.  Look at maps that show annual temperature (and summer highs and winter lows), average number of sunshine hours and annual rainfall. These maps show all of these.  For example, we chose not to go further south because the grass in summer can be a spikey, prickly brown barb to sit on; we like soft green grassy picnics.   You’ll want to find the right balance of your preferred weather with the house prices in that area, amongst other criteria.

A related article on French property is Maintaining a Second Property in France which has helpful advice on how to manage your French property if it's a second property and you don't live in France.

4.  Intensive Viewing 

Approach your viewing trips like an organised military operation.  If you live in England (or elsewhere) now and can’t be on the ground all the time, then going round to estate agents offices isn’t such a practical option.  Set aside an extended weekend or week where you can go to France and visit properties back to back.  Use websites like Leggett, Green Acres or Century21 to find properties that meet your (current) criteria.  These three websites have good tick box options for defining what you want in their search system.

Arrange a number of viewings in an area, back to back (3 to 5 properties per day is realistically achievable.  More in town, less in remote rural areas), and print out the property listings with photos.  When at the property, make notes on these print-outs because after you’ve viewed 10, they might blur together somewhat in your memory.  As you visit you might also use the smartphone app Evernote (or similar) to take notes, photos and audio notes as you go around the property and think things through, to remind yourself in the future.

Also use Google Maps to calculate the time to drive from one property viewing to the next, to make sure you have enough time between scheduled bookings.  Print out these maps.  Also an overview map is handy.

Print out the property address of each property and contact details for each agent you’ll be seeing.  In reality, plans slip and change, so if you can call the agent to let them know you’re running late it is more polite and keeps them onside for your next viewing with them.  Leave at least one afternoon free to mooch around the area, driving willy-nilly anywhere and also to check out the amenities, schools, supermarkets, the tourist office and research any holiday adventure activities, like canoeing, zoos etc (your gite guests will want to know what there is to do in the area). 

I did 3 or 4 trips like this, each for 3 or 4 days, in different areas, each with 7 to 10 property viewings, and eventually found our ideal gite farmhouse.  I did the trips on my own simply because it was easier with only 1 of us off work, and we didn’t need to organise childcare this way.  When I’d found 3 perfect properties, my good lady and I took a repeat trip to view them to make the final decision.  She fell in love with our final choice almost instantly. Don’t worry, it wasn’t her first!

5.  Rent for A While

We didn’t do this and just got ‘lucky’ (also known as ‘applied hard work’) but a few friends did advise to rent in the area you’ve honed down to, before you buy.  This gives you a lower risk method to scope out the area, schools, amenities, weather in winter (!) and how friendly the locals are, particularly with us jonny-foreigner types.

One friend of ours did this in a few places. As an aside, she used to do this for holidays, to rent a house for a year, for about the cost of a few weeks holiday, and sometimes sub-let it to friends to cover some of the cost or house-swap with them.  Renting for the year is much cheaper per week than holiday rentals.

6.  Haggle

Don’t be afraid to put in a cheeky offer.  We got 10,000 off the asking price for ours, but you might get a lot more off than that.  A friend of ours just got 50% off the initial asking price.  Yes, that is not a typo.  The house was on the market for 200,000 initially, and he put in a (frankly insanely cheeky) offer at 100,000, the seller just wanted to get shot of the place (nothing wrong with the property, the vendor just needed to move away), so the buyer saved 100,000, just by asking and maybe pushing their luck a bit (or a lot!).

If you follow rule number 1 (don’t fall in love with the first place you see) then you can consider putting cheeky offers in on a number of places you like.  The agent may be on your side with this approach; even though they are on a percentage commission and hence the bigger the sale price the bigger their commission, often many agents would rather take a smaller amount of more sales.

Similarly, going via a local notaire or mayor can cut out the considerable cost of an estate agent (the estate agents often take 12% of the sale price).

7.  Don't under estimate the difficulty of renovating

Many practical minded dreamers (I mean that in a nice way – I was one) view a few properties that would be very definitely classed as ‘fixer-uppers’ or maybe even ‘knock it down and start againers’, and think “I could do that” or “we could get the builders in to do X, Y and Z”.  

There are 3 main problems with renovation; it will take ages to DIY, building materials cost more in France, and how do you find a builder you trust? Yes, you probably could do it yourself.  But realistically, how long will it take you? There is an additional consideration with DIY; do you really want to be spending all your holidays doing the manual labour of renovating?  

A key thought process we went through was “We don’t want to waste the kids’ precious holiday time while we do the place up – the sooner we get it done, the more holidays we can have before they rapidly grow up and leave home”. Equally, you might love doing the doing the renovations yourself.

My mum and her man have been slowly doing their place up for about 8 years and that’s what they do on their trips over to France.  They’re happy doing that (and their kids are all grown up and left home).

We bought a place that was just on the edge of the ‘needs renovating’ category.  It was a beautiful farmhouse with a tired 1970’s décor. We took the plunge and got a team of builders to gut the main house and insulate every inch of the place and fully renovate and add ensuite bathrooms etc.  They did a good job, but it took a lot of project management from me to chivvy and move things forward and to make the right decisions along the way.  They messed us around towards the end, and for our next project (barn conversion) we used someone else.  The end result is an absolutely stunning Farmhouse gite in Dordogne that we’re very pleased with, but I’m just being honest with you as to how much work to expect.  

Even if you find a good and trustworthy builder, you will need to make many micro-decisions along the way; what colour electrical plugs?  What thickness insulation (above the legal minimum) do you want?  How big should the shower tray be? And the choices go on!

Equally, finding a builder that matches your renovation approach isn’t easy.  The first builder we had was okay, but didn’t have the vision we had – he was more of a wall builder than a quality renovator.  The second builder we used, totally got our vision for the barn conversion we wanted to do, and also came in with lots of great ideas of his own along the way.  

As a for instance, here is the before and after views of the barn conversion that our second builder completed.

And that’s it.  These are my 7 Tips for Buying A Gîte in France which hopefully you'll find helpful.  Keep my handy and lesser-known tips to buying your dream home or gîte in France in mind and your purchase process will be much easier. 

If you would like to book the beautiful Gite Dordogne for your next French holiday you can contact Duncan on his website contact page here.  Thanks to Duncan for this guest post.

Want even more help on purchasing a property in France? Then you might like these tips from Our French Story - Buying Property: Location, Location

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