Episode: 3216
Title: HPR3216: Buying a second home in France
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3216/hpr3216.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:59:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3216 for Monday, 30 November 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Buying a Second Home in France. It is hosted by Euro-Oen Baton,
and is about 16 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
steps I have taken up to now for Buying a Second Home in another country.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hi guys, this is Jerome Baton again with another podcast. This time, the subject is buying
a second house in France. This is a project and it's a pretty nerdy one as well.
Bear with me while I try to explain everything that's involved.
This is a project that's now two years in the making. I still don't have a second house in France.
But we're getting there. And the process of finding and acquiring is a project.
And I think it's a pretty nerdy one that I like to share with you.
But let me first say I'm not a millionaire. I'm not a wealthy guy.
I don't do bad either. But the thing is I'm now I'm myself I'm living in a Netherlands.
And I think I should tell you a few things about the housing market in the Netherlands.
At the moment, you know, we've got a population of about 17 million.
And there's a shortage estimated shortage shortage of around 300,000 houses.
This has to do with social trends like more people are living alone a living alone than single living single.
Then back in the day. So the demand rises and it rises more.
It rises more than that the market can can respond to that.
This also means in a market that's dominated by pricing and shortage.
That housing prices, house prices in the Netherlands are pretty steep and that's a trend that has been going on for years.
And so the average house price in the Netherlands, the average house price is a short of 300,000 euros.
Which in my opinion is a pretty hefty amount of money.
If you want cheap house, you can get one for maybe something around 100,000 euros.
But you'll probably have a very small house living right next to a pretty busy road, for instance.
So the average is 300,000 euros.
There are a lot of guys selling or being intermediary for people looking for a house and people selling houses.
That's a thriving business clearly.
And they all sort of use the same website.
Well, there are more websites but you know, it's like Amazon. There are other websites but a lot of people think that Amazon is the only one in the world selling books.
Almost or the biggest one. Now, it's the same with the Netherlands but it's called FUNDA, FUNDA.NL.
And there you can search your hearts content for houses in the Netherlands.
And like I said for steep prices. So I was thinking about well, I've got now, I sold my house two years ago.
It was a big house. We now do living in a nice rental place.
And I was at some time vacationing in France and I thought well, they've got a lot more space here than in the Netherlands because we are pretty overpopulated.
And well, the food is not bad either. I mean, the occasional bottle of wine or a nice cheese. It's all there.
So why not? You know, it's an idea. I've got lots of ideas. Most of them never amount to much.
And I'm not saying that this one will. But I had this idea. Let's see if I can get a second house. A small house in France.
So we try to find an area where we should start our search.
And what are the criteria for that? Do you want something that you can fly to or do you want something at a driving distance and how long will you make some driving time?
So we thought well, you know, about a day, if you leave in the morning and you arrive in the evening, that's fine with me.
But that's still, if you really like to, you can still go from Netherlands to the south of France, even almost to Spain.
So that's a pretty big area. But we decided on something in the middle, you know, maybe close to the sea. I don't know, maybe close to the mountains. You know, what your preference is.
And that's not really important for the story.
So we zoomed in on some particular area and last September, we took a couple of weeks vacation and we visited that area driving around looking to cities, looking to places, looking at what's the word for it.
Those guys selling houses, you know what I mean? I don't know the word in English, but it's probably something simple.
And look at the prices and those are a lot less than the prices in the Netherlands, but it's of course a completely different area.
So we found an area and I thought to myself, can I get a list of all the villages in this area?
So clearly I went to open street map, zoomed in on the area, I could download all the data for France and make my own database, install a geo server instance to query that.
But yeah, that's all possible and very nice if you know what you're doing, which I clearly didn't. It can be all, everything can be much simpler.
So I asked a question on a select channel of guys working on map data and I got the link to a site called overpass-turbo.eu.
And you can enter queries there and in a certain specific overpass query language.
And I thought, yeah, okay, but now where do I find a query? Well, on wiki.openstreammap.org, slash wiki, slash overpass, underscore API, slash overpass, underscore API, underscore buy, underscore example.
There is a very nice query. If you simply search for village notes, you can see a query that you can paste into the overpass-turbo.eu site.
And on the right side of your browsing window is Google Maps, you know, is an area shown of the country and you can zoom in, zoom out, pan, whatever you like.
So the area that's shown on the right, you can query with the overpass query that you type in or paste on the left in an edit box.
So I did that and I got an XML data of, I don't know, 120, 130 villages.
So that gave me the name of the village and the postal code and the number of inhabitants.
And so I brew myself a small Python program to convert that into a Postgres table because the SQL for me is much easier to query.
And I ran another query to generate a CSV file with again the name of the village, the number of inhabitants, the postal code.
But also the URL for Google Maps search and I imported that file into Libra Office in a spreadsheet.
I edited the column with the Google Maps URL so that it would become clickable.
So now I'm in the process of clicking on all the villages that I think may be interested with regards to the number of inhabitants.
And see if there's not a large road next to this village or into this village.
Maybe if there was a bar or if there's a church, not that I'm a church going, but it tells you something about the size and the activity of the community.
So currently I'm in the process of evaluating about 70 villages in the area that I'm interested in.
And in a way it's good fun to open such a village in Google Maps first, see how much forest is there in that particular area.
Or is it all a flat surface with fields for, let's say corn and like and other agricultural stuff.
And if so then I'll, if it's that sound, if that looks good, switch to street view.
Well, and then you see the shortcomings that we've not yet got everything, every road in the world in street view.
I've even had a few villages that are not that don't have any road included in street view.
But most of the time at least one of the roads through the village is in street view.
So I can have a look around because some of the villages are a little bit run down.
Yeah, that's I think the best expression and some of the villages are looking pretty pretty good.
So I hope that in a couple of weeks I'm done with that assessment and then I'm pretty curious.
If I gather all that information, if there's some sub area within my area that I seem to fancy more than other areas.
And the thing is also that the housing market in France is completely different from the Netherlands.
So in the Netherlands we have a shortage in France, there's no shortages of houses on the contrary.
It quite often happens that when the grandfather passes away the house is just left and maybe they visit that once a year or something and after 50 years it's pretty run down.
You have a lot of houses that way.
But a rundown house still has an owner, even if it's on paper, but you can buy that for a dime and start restoring it to its former glory if you fancy that.
And the other thing is that the housing market in France is pretty competitive.
In the Netherlands, when you sign a contract with a realtor, I think that's the word for it.
If you sign a contract with a realtor in the Netherlands, it's exclusive.
So you have one realtor for the house that you're trying to sell.
In France you can go to multiple realtor to sell your house.
So they don't have a guarantee that they will sell your house because maybe you've gone to a couple of other guys as well.
So that also means that they don't bundle their offerings on one overall website where you can search for all the houses in France.
Sure, there are the scrapers, sites that scrape from other sites and doth give you some overall perspective, but it's not complete.
It just gives you an indication of completeness or feeling, but it isn't.
So you have to contact individual realtor in the area, more than one, and clearly state what you're looking for.
And then they will no doubt be glad to offer assistance and to sell you a house, of course.
Add to that the fact that almost everybody, well, you can't call yourself officially a realtor in France without a diploma, but you can get a license from a registered realtor, which makes you a supply-sense realtor.
And then you can say that you also sell houses, which does not really make things more clear or reliable.
So you really have to, if you are interested in buying a second house in France, you really have to look into this and read some books about its subject.
If you like, there's also a very nice podcast by any sergeant that discusses buying a house in France.
And it's in English as well. I'll look up the URL and put it in the show notes as well.
So anyway, that was my short story about how far I am at the moment. It's not, maybe I don't have a house yet. Maybe one day I will, I don't know, I hope so.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you have some questions, additional comments, whatever, put them in the comments with the show, and I'll be more than glad to respond to them in a follow-up.
Have a nice day. Bye-bye.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.