Excellent post. I’ve have wanted to respond since it was published but decided to wait until we launched the latest version of our website.

I am an estate agent operating in the south of the Dordogne and north Lot-et-Garonne.

Like you we were fed up with our clients being fed up with estate agents here in France because they refuse to the the client the location of a property for all the reason you mention.

We decided to turn that on its head. We may well be taking a huge risk but we’re willing to take that chance.

Like you, we believe that it’s only a matter of time before agents are forced to operate in France as they do in the US and UK etc.

We launched this weekend and in the first release have built in Google maps for each property we list along with the usual photos.

For the next release we have plans to plug in more features along the same lines that hopefully will mean when a client sends us an enquiry it will be to ask to visit the property.

The idea is to provide a house hunter with so much information in several different formats that they feel the only thing left to do is visit it.

Anyway, that’s the plan. We would welcome any comments you have on the site, if you have time to look it up, that you think would help us improve it bearing in mind the points your make in your post above.