Author: marc

In November 2023 my wife Marieke and I saw twelve houses in the Pyrénées-Orientales in four days. I had planned the whole week in Notion: a table of appointments, a page of estate agents to drop in on, and a packing list. It all worked. On paper.

A viewing trip rarely fails because of the houses. It fails in the diary. Here is how to plan one, what we learned from our own, and how to do it now without Notion: with My trip, the new tab in your shortlist.

What our own plan looked like

We ended up buying in Sainte-Marie-la-Mer (the story is in Buying in the Pyrénées-Orientales: what we learned). This was the week behind it:

• Monday: no houses. Two phone calls to estate agents to confirm the viewings.
• Tuesday: three viewings, including one in Torreilles on the coast at half past one and one in Céret, inland, at quarter to four.
• Wednesday: three viewings, spread over the morning and afternoon.
• Thursday: three viewings, in Sainte-Marie-la-Mer, Le Barcarès and Cabestany.
• In between: dropping in on estate agents unannounced. That is where we saw what was really for sale, not just what was online.

Look at that Tuesday. Torreilles to Céret is roughly three quarters of an hour by car. That works, as long as nothing overruns. But something always overruns at a viewing: the seller wants to show you the garden, the agent knows the neighbour, you want one more look in the loft.

Five rules for a viewing trip

• One area per day. The coast one day, inland the next. It saves hours in the car, and you compare houses in the same surroundings.
• Three viewings a day at most. You will not remember more. After the fourth house the kitchens start to blur.
• Start with phone calls, not viewings. Confirm every appointment on your first day. An unconfirmed viewing is a wish.
• Keep a day free. Use it for local estate agents. A local agent often knows about houses before they go online. Read how French estate agents work before you go.
• Ask for the address in good time. Many listings only name the commune, and you usually only get the exact address from the agent. Ask for it when you confirm.

How to plan it in My trip

Your shortlist already had a board and a table. The third tab is now called My trip. This is how it works:

1. Put your houses on your shortlist. Through the Search Helper, or by pasting the text of a listing.
2. Set a house to Viewing booked and fill in the date, time and address.
3. Enter your arrival and departure dates. You then see every day of your trip, including the days with nothing planned yet.
4. Add your other appointments: an estate agent, the notaire, the bank or a phone call. They slot in between your viewings, in order of time.

Each day has three buttons:

• Route in Google Maps puts that day’s appointments in order. If an address is missing, the route runs via the commune, and it tells you so.
• Add to my calendar creates a calendar file for your phone or Outlook. Per day, or all at once with Whole trip in my calendar.
• + Appointment on this day for anything that comes up later.

The packing list

Our own packing list from 2023 was mostly chargers. The one in My trip is about the viewings:

• Documents: your passport and proof of funds or a mortgage agreement in principle. An agent will sometimes ask for it before opening the door.
• For the viewings: the printed viewing checklist, a tape measure and a torch for the cellar, loft and crawl space.
• On the road: a Crit’Air sticker if you drive through a low-emission zone.

Tick off what you have packed and add your own items.

Everything stays with you

My trip works like the rest of the shortlist: everything is stored in your own browser, and we see nothing. Want a backup? Use Email my shortlist to myself below your shortlist, and your houses and viewings are in your inbox too.

Twelve houses in four days is perfectly doable. Twelve houses in four days across the whole département is not.

We own a house in the Pyrénées-Orientales, in Sainte-Marie-la-Mer, and by now I can say it plainly: it suits us well. Better than we dared hope when we bought.

Even so, this is not the piece where I tell you to come and look here too.

Look at this first. A house in the Alpes-Maritimes, around Nice and Cannes, costs on average €5,671 per square metre. On the same Mediterranean, a few hundred kilometres west, you pay €2,963 here (MeilleursAgents, 1 September 2026). Almost half. Anyone who sees that gap starts looking for the catch, and there is one. It just isn’t where most buyers look.

So here is what this area is, what it isn’t, and the two things we only found out once we were already here.

Why we chose it

• The climate. Warm summers with a breeze, winters that often stay above ten degrees, and pleasant weather from March to November.
• Sea and mountains together. The beach in the morning, and ski resorts such as Font-Romeu and Les Angles within about an hour and a half.
• The Catalan character. Warm, welcoming, and noticeably different from the rest of France.
• Spain next door. Barcelona and Girona are an easy day out.

This is Catalonia, and that is not folklore

• The signs are bilingual. Perpignan is also Perpinyà.
• The flag on the houses is yellow with red stripes, not blue, white and red.
• At midsummer, Sant Joan, a flame is brought down from the top of the Canigou, the 2,784-metre mountain that dominates the whole département, and carried to the villages in the valley. That is not an event for tourists. That is a region explaining who it is.

For you as a buyer that has a practical side. You are not moving to “the south of France” with olive trees, lavender and a Provençal market. You are moving to an area with its own language, its own cooking and its own relationship with Spain, which starts half an hour down the road. If that appeals, you will love it here. If you wanted the Provence postcard, you will be disappointed.

The coast is really two coasts

North of Argelès: the sandy coast. Le Barcarès, Sainte-Marie-la-Mer (where we are), Canet-en-Roussillon, Saint-Cyprien and Argelès-sur-Mer itself.

• Wide beaches, lots of flats and campsites, lots of building from the 1970s and 1980s.
• Full in August, quiet in January, and that difference is bigger than you can feel at a viewing in May.

South of Argelès: the Côte Vermeille. Here the Pyrenees run into the sea, the coast turns rocky and the villages sit in bays.

• Collioure, where Matisse and Derain invented Fauvism in 1905 because the light did something there it did nowhere else.
• Port-Vendres, still a working harbour.
• Banyuls-sur-Mer, of the sweet wine and the sculptor Aristide Maillol.
• Cerbère, the last village before the border, which grew because French and Spanish trains ran on different gauges and everything had to be transferred there.

That second coast is prettier, more expensive and thin on houses for sale. Collioure sells itself. Don’t count on département averages there.

Perpignan is a real city, with everything that comes with it

Plenty of buyers want to be “near Perpignan” without ever having spent a week there. Do spend one.

• The good: a hospital, schools, a university, a TGV station, daily markets and an old centre with the Castillet and the Palace of the Kings of Majorca. Life, twelve months a year. Exactly what a coastal village doesn’t give you in January.
• The less good: it is also a city with poverty, with neighbourhoods where you shouldn’t buy blind, and with unemployment among the highest in France. That is part of the reason you pay half of what Cannes costs.

Walk the street where you want to buy three times at three different moments, and make sure one of them is a Sunday evening in November.

Lesson one: the tramontane

The tramontane is a dry, strong north-westerly wind squeezed through the gap between the Pyrenees and the Corbières towards the sea.

• The upside: it clears the air, keeps humidity low and keeps the mosquitoes away.
• The downside: it wrecks your parasol, your awning and your terrace plants, and after three days it starts to wear on your mood.

This is not a reason not to buy. It is a reason to ask at a viewing which side the house catches the wind from, and whether that lovely terrace is sheltered or exactly in the firing line. At our viewing we looked at the view. We didn’t look at the wind direction.

Lesson two: water, and this is the real catch

The Pyrénées-Orientales has been in drought since 2022, and it has not been one bad summer.

• In summer 2026 the Aspres area, 23 communes, was again at the highest level, “crise”, under the prefecture’s July order, with other zones on alert. The latest order dates from 11 September 2026.
• In practice that means, depending on the level: no filling private pools, watering restricted to certain hours or banned, limited car washing. Fines run to €1,500.
• That hits exactly the things a second home is bought for.

So this is the question you ask, at the mairie and not the agent, before you make an offer: which zone is this commune in, what restrictions apply now, and what applied in the last three summers? You can also look up any commune on vigieau.gouv.fr, and the prefecture publishes every order online.

Getting here from the UK and Ireland

• Perpignan airport: seasonal Ryanair flights from London Stansted, Birmingham and Leeds Bradford, and Aer Lingus from Dublin. Jet2 has announced Manchester from May 2027.
• Girona and Barcelona: far more routes, many all year, then a drive across the border.
• Carcassonne and Béziers: more seasonal Ryanair flights, a bit over an hour’s drive away.
• By train: Eurostar to Paris, then a direct TGV to Perpignan in about five hours at best.
• By car: a long two-day drive from the Channel ports.

Flight schedules change every season, and several French regional routes were cut in winter after France raised its air ticket tax in 2025. Work it out honestly once, including how often a year you want to come. That sum changes more decisions than whether the house is pretty.

Who this area works for

• For people who want the sea, are happy to have the mountains too, don’t mind Spain round the corner and aren’t expecting a Provençal village.
• For people who want their budget to buy square metres rather than a postcode.
• For people willing to ask the water question before it gets fun, rather than finding out in July that the pool stays empty this year.

We bought here and would do it again. But not because it was cheap. The area costs half as much as the Côte d’Azur, and that is not a bargain. It is a price with a story, and you can find out that story before you sign.

Not sure yet whether this is your region? Try the region finder: eight questions, three regions that suit you. Going to viewings? Take the viewing checklist, and use the buying costs calculator to work out what a house really costs, including the notaire.

Prices: MeilleursAgents, 1 September 2026. Drought measures: Préfecture des Pyrénées-Orientales, orders of July and 11 September 2026. Flights: airport and airline announcements, summer 2026. Background on the Côte Vermeille and Catalan Roussillon partly inspired by Détours en France no. 274, September 2026.

When I wrote that there is no French Rightmove, and how to build your own, one reply came back more than any other: “Great, but I can’t do it. I just don’t understand those French sites.”

Now there is something for that. The Search Helper is made for everyone who can’t get on with French property sites: no French, no filters, no département codes. You fill in once what you are looking for, and we set it up on six French property sites. All you do is click.

Go to the Search Helper

Why searching French sites so often goes wrong

When Marieke and I were looking in the Pyrénées-Orientales, we spent the first six months doing it exactly wrong. These are the mistakes almost everyone makes:

• You enter a département and get thousands of houses, from the coast to deep in the mountains. After ten minutes of scrolling you give up.
• You only search the town you know. French buyers search with a radius of twenty or thirty kilometres and also see the villages whose names you don’t know yet.
• You don’t understand the French buttons. “Sauvegarder la recherche”, “Créer une alerte”, “chambres” versus “pièces”: every site does it differently.
• You don’t set an alert. In a popular commune a keenly priced house is gone within a week. Without an alert you see it too late.

The difference is bigger than you think. Search SeLoger for Céret alone and you get 122 houses. Add everything within twenty kilometres and there are 1,364. On Leboncoin more than 2,500. Same budget, same wishes. You just weren’t seeing them.

How the Search Helper works, in four steps

Step 1: fill in once what you are looking for. In English. A town, a radius, house or flat, your budget and the number of bedrooms. If you want, add a minimum plot size, a maximum energy rating, a pool or private sellers only.

Step 2: open the sites with one click. Each site gets its own card.

• Leboncoin, SeLoger and Bien’ici: fully prefilled, including the villages within your radius. You click and land on the results page with your search.
• Green-Acres: opens in English with type, budget and radius ready; you only type in the town.
• PAP and the notaires: they can’t be prefilled, so you get a crib sheet: fill in this, in this order.

Step 3: set an alert there. Each card tells you, in English, which button to click. From then on new listings come to you instead of the other way round.

Step 4: keep what you find on your shortlist. At the bottom of the Search Helper you paste the link of the house. Paste the text of the listing as well, and the tool picks out the asking price, living area, energy rating and number of bedrooms. Town, département and source are filled in for you. Your Shortlist works out the price per square metre.

After three weeks that list shows you things no single site does: which houses stay unsold, where prices drop, and what a realistic price per square metre is in your commune. And before you make an offer, check DVF, the public database of what was really paid in that street over the past five years. An asking price is an opinion. DVF is a fact.

Your links in your inbox

Leave your email address and your links arrive in your inbox. That way you find them again on your phone and laptop, without filling everything in again.

• If a site changes its search function, we let you know and update the links.
• There is a separate box for anyone who wants a local estate agent to email suitable houses. It is unticked by default, it goes to agents we know (in the Pyrénées-Orientales that is our partner Liam Gall), they only receive your search profile and email address, and you can withdraw at any time.
• Leave the box empty and nothing changes.

Who is it for?

• Anyone who has ever given up on a French property site.
• Anyone who doesn’t speak French and doesn’t want to guess what “pièces” means.
• Anyone who knows an area but not the names of the thirty villages around it.
• Anyone who simply wants to see what is for sale, without first taking a course in French property websites.

The Search Helper is free, like the rest of the site. Enter your town and see what is for sale within twenty kilometres. Chances are it is more than you thought.

Go to the Search Helper

Something not working, or a site missing? Let us know through the contact form. The tool is new and we improve it with your feedback.

The first thing I did when we started looking seriously in the Pyrénées-Orientales was search for the French Rightmove. I spent a whole evening on it. That site does not exist.

That is not a gap in the market someone is about to fill. It is simply how the French property market works. And once you understand that, you search better than most buyers who will be standing next to you at the same viewing.

Why the UK has Rightmove and France doesn’t

In the UK almost every agent puts their listings on one or two big portals. In Ireland it is Daft.ie and MyHome.ie. You open one site and you see the market. It feels so normal that you don’t notice how unusual it is.

France has no such central database:

• No obligation to list. There is no legal requirement to register a house for sale anywhere, and no trade body that pools the listings.
• Several agents per house. A seller usually signs a mandat simple with an agent, which lets them give the same house to three other agencies as well. Each agency takes its own photos, writes its own text and charges its own fee. That is why you find the same house on three sites with three different prices.
• The portals are adverts, not a register. Agents pay per listing. Whoever doesn’t pay isn’t there. By one estimate around 30 percent of listings appear on only one platform.
• A big share never reaches the portals. Notaires sell houses themselves, private owners sell directly, and in many villages the best house is still in the window of the agency on the square.

With close to a million sales a year (958,000 in the twelve months to the end of February 2026, according to the Notaires de France), that adds up to a huge number of houses you never see if you stick to one site.

The five layers of the French market

Don’t think in websites, think in layers. Each layer has a different kind of seller, and so a different kind of opportunity.

1. The big commercial portals.

• Leboncoin has the most volume: over a million listings and around 42 million visits a month, private sellers and agents mixed.
• SeLoger is the agents’ stronghold, and has taken private listings too since 2023.
• Bien’ici is owned by the French estate agents’ federations, so it only carries professional listings, but it has by far the best map view.

2. Private sellers. PAP.fr stands for de particulier à particulier and only accepts private sellers. No agency fee, so at the same asking price you pay less. Few foreign buyers search here seriously, because it is all in French and the owner answers the phone.

3. The notaires. immobilier.notaires.fr and immonot.com are the sites of the French notaries. In large parts of the country, especially Normandy, Brittany and the north, the notaire sells houses directly. Those listings often appear nowhere else, and competition from other buyers is lowest.

4. Local channels. The village agency’s own website, the regional paper, the noticeboard at the bakery. Agents usually put a new house on their own site first and only days later on the portals, if at all. This is the layer where speed lives.

5. English-language sites. Green-Acres, Properstar and the UK portals for overseas property. Comfortable, because everything is in English and someone picks up the phone. But it is a selection of a selection, often priced with a foreign buyer in mind. Here, comfort costs money.

Your own French Rightmove, in one evening

The answer is not finding one better website. It is building a system that searches the five layers for you while you get on with your life.

Step 1. Fix your search profile before you open a single site.

• Not “the south of France”, but two or three communes with a radius around them.
• Not “about two hundred thousand”, but a maximum including notaire fees, agency fees and the first round of work.
• Not sure where? Try the region finder first and run your numbers in the buying costs calculator.

Step 2. Learn ten French words. Maison de village, mas, longère, mazet, corps de ferme, terrain constructible, à rénover, viager, DPE, sans vis-à-vis. Without them you search France like a tourist.

Step 3. Save a search with an alert on every source. This is the heart of it, and the step most people skip.

• Create an account on Leboncoin, SeLoger, Bien’ici, PAP and immobilier.notaires.fr.
• Enter your profile, save the search and set the alert to daily or instant.
• Search by commune with a radius, not by département, or your inbox drowns.

From then on the market comes to you. In a popular commune a keenly priced house is gone within a week, and the difference between viewing it or not is exactly that alert.

Step 4. Go one layer deeper than the portals. Search for immobilier plus the town name and open the agencies’ own sites. Bookmark them in a folder and check them every week. Search the same commune on immonot too, because notaire listings rarely reach the portals.

Step 5. Keep everything in one overview. One line per house, with: link, commune, asking price, agency fee included yes or no, living area, plot, DPE rating, taxe foncière, date found, status and your own note.

That overview is your Rightmove. After three weeks it shows you things no site does: which houses stay unsold, where prices drop, and what a realistic price per square metre is in your commune. Take your viewing checklist once you start viewing, and you compare like with like.

Don’t want to build a spreadsheet? The free Shortlist does it for you, with the price per m² worked out. And if the French sites themselves are the problem, the Search Helper sets up steps 1 to 3 on six sites at once.

The check almost nobody does

There is one source no agent will mention unprompted, and you can learn it in five minutes: DVF.

• What it is: demandes de valeurs foncières, the French tax authority’s open database of the prices actually paid in every property sale.
• How far back: the last five years, down to the individual plot.
• How current: updated twice a year, in spring and autumn.
• What’s missing: Alsace, Moselle and Mayotte, where the records are kept elsewhere.

Click on the street where the house is and you see what the neighbours really paid, when, and for how many square metres. Go there before you make an offer, not after. An asking price is an opinion. DVF is a fact.

What this gets you

One evening’s work. Five accounts, five alerts, a bookmark folder of agency sites and the overview from step 5. After that you see more houses than someone who spends an hour on one site every Sunday, and you see them sooner.

The French Rightmove is not coming. Whoever accepts that first sees the house first.

One thing worth knowing before you ring the first agency: the agent works for the seller, not for you, and his commission is usually already inside the asking price.

Sources: listing and visitor figures from Pretto, “Quel est le meilleur site immobilier en 2026”; the 30 percent single-platform estimate and Bien’ici ownership from monmarcheimmobilier.fr (2026); 958,000 sales from the Notaires de France market note of 27 April 2026; DVF details from the app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr FAQ.