Getting Information about places and property Part One

If you are planning to move to France you will be searching lots of estate-agents websites and many of the online portals to get information on property and to find out what is on offer. This article is about finding information about places, prices and problems.

How to find and select a property is a complex question and I am preparing another article on this. As with most Internet searching the Big “G” , medium “Y” and smallish “M” are search engines which can reveal millions of pages – I am sharing some of the pages I know and use regularly and which I have refined and used for several years.

http://www.patrimoine-de-france.org/ Claims 450,000 items of information and history relating to regions, departments and villages in France – a messy site to use and far from complete – but there are nuggets of information relating to things you may miss elsewhere such as flooding and fires.

http://www.notaires.fr/notaires/notaires.nsf/V_TC_PUB/ENGLISH-HOMEPAGE You have to use a Notaire and you may as well understand what they do – their official site has this English option and a lot of information – but sometimes it is hard to find – there is a real-estate “portal” which lists a few (very few) properties for sale not shown anywhere else so it is worth searching

http://www.immobilier.notaires.fr/jahia/Jahia/lang/en and http://www.immoprix.com/ which is linked from the Notaire site and gives a fair indication of property price trends outside of Paris – this used to be an awful site but has tidied up it’s act it seems and does not crash my computer as much now. This is less focused guide than the one available from

http://www.pap.fr/ but it claims to only give statistics when it has enough relevant data. Notaire do have access to a restricted database of all sales and their information will be more current and comprehensive – it is always a good idea, once you have determined exactly where you are going to buy a property, to find by recommendation, an intelligent and cooperative Notaire

http://www.paris.notaires.fr/ Gives a lot of information, including property prices, for the Paris region and is one of the better sites (apart from the silly animation)

http://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/-Inondations-.html This is an infuriating site – there are many useful pages of information, but the navigation and search boxes keep switching to other less informative sites – also the English pages are worse than useless as they are usually just empty – however, keep on the site and read between the lines and some real nugget of data are shown.

http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/ is a site linked back to in the navigation from the ecologie.gouv.fr site – it looks like work in progress and is a typically daft French site of irritating images and pointless pages – but again, drill down and there are some good bits of information