All the inquiries go to spam on the Riviera?
People tend to say I’m lucky. I am. I have a gorgeous wife and a lovely daughter and my son is due to make an appearance soon. I am lucky. But I always worked a lot so the divine luck could find me. After some side paths, a burning desire formed in me to become a software developer. Almost five years ago, we moved to the Cote d’Azur with my wife to pursue my dream. Not a typical destination like the Bay Area or London, but at least as exciting and sadly, similarly expensive.
The sun is shining almost all year long, warm waves are swashing the somewhere sandy, somewhere rocky beaches while the French Alps are rising behind. And there is even more, there is an area halfway between Nice and Cannes, a few kilometres from the sea, in the middle of the forests, an area called Sophia Antipolis, a.k.a. the French Silicon Valley. That’s where I spend most of my days.
With my wife, we are not heirs of enormous riches. I mean we had no financial support to buy an apartment in a country that is wealthier, thus more expensive than our motherland. When we moved to the region, we had to rent a flat.
When I left my parent’s house back in Hungary, I bought my own apartment with a nice little mortgage. In other words, I didn’t have any experience in renting one. Maybe writing an “own apartment” is a little bit of an exaggeration when a bank is almost fully funding your acquisition. Still, I didn’t have to deal with owners as a tenant.
In France when you have no extensive work history and in addition, you are on a probation period, getting an apartment is just as easy as getting a credit card in the States without having a credit history… Sometimes these tasks make you feel being stuck in a deadlock, but there is no way to kill the process or to reboot.
Luckily, the company that hired me provides help with finding a new home to those who arrive at Sophia Antipolis from another region or country.
Less than 3 weeks after my plane landed in Nice, the ink was drying on our tenancy agreement.
We moved to a 60 m2, 2 bedroom apartment somewhere not that far from the centres of Antibes and Juan-les-Pins. The residence was immense with hundreds of apartments, still, it was calm most of the time. And the flat was relatively cheap.
It was affordable and not surprisingly a bit dingy, it needed a fresh paint here and there, the tiles had better days, we had to change some isolations, repair a lousy cabinet door, but given the budget we had and the fact that the flats proposed by the relocation agency, it was perfect to start with. In fact, it was a flat that I found, and the agent organised the visit for us.
From time to time during the next years, we were thinking about buying our own flat. But we were just playing with the idea, juggling with the numbers. We were daydreaming. We thought that we should wait a couple of years before jumping into a loan. Paralysis by analysis — one might say.
Still, I opened every morning the main website for French real estate advertisements. Just to learn about the market, to understand what is available, what we might expect for the money we — at one day might — have.
From month to month, year to year, we devoted more and more thought to the idea of becoming an owner.
Some local friends bought an apartment with zero initial contribution. Other friends in Hungary were keeping us busy with their news about searching for one. The seeds were planted in our minds already and the rainfall of news from friends and acquaintances grew the seeds into leafy trees.
In the middle of the summer in 2017, we decided to go all-in and buy an apartment. We started to spend even more time on browsing the different websites looking for our new home. We started with two or three aggregating websites and soon we were directly checking the sites of a few specific agencies.
After about a week of desperately trying to contact some of the advertisers, we already got richer with some important pieces of information.
Agents here in the South of France barely respond to emails. Maybe they don’t know how to start them up or they just think that clicking, double-clicking are not part of their job descriptions, we don’t know. Still, it is quite strange to me given that they advertise on the internet and they do provide an email address as a contact. For me, on the other hand, it would have been advantageous to communicate via that channel as my written French is stronger than the spoken and to send a mail and then to read the response anytime fits more in my agenda than chasing someone on the phone and waiting for the agent to gather the necessary information from his notes, whatever.
The most bizarre situation was when once an agent replied to my inquiry weeks later. He said he’s sorry but all the emails he receives from the ad site go to his spam folder. When I read his email I had no idea whether I should laugh or cry. He posts an advertisement and all the emails from potential buyers are sent to the spams. Logical! Fewer contacts, less work to do! I deleted the email without any resentment.
Another strange behaviour of the agents we contacted that they don’t really care what you look for. Oh, sorry. My English is bad. They really don’t care what you look for. We had quite a clear idea about what we wanted; in terms of price, flat characteristics and location.
We created an advertisement in French, looking for our new home. To make sure it actually makes sense, two French colleagues of mine proofread it. Afterwards, whenever we sent an email to an agent we sent this document attached. We always had it printed with us too to give it to any real estate agent we’d meet.
And still… they didn’t mind sending flats that didn’t meet some or almost any of these requirements. I really felt shocked. This behaviour undermined trust in the very beginning and wasted lots of time, in fact.
Eventually, we started to visit some apartments…
