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.
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.
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.