An update on the house search

May 21st 2007

I haven’t taken the time to post an update on our house search, so here it goes.

We looked at a few houses in our city and the two cities next door. Most weren’t that great, either the location was not good (too far from the train station) or they were too small, old, or had no yard. I guess we’re pretty difficult, but as one home seller told us “It’s not like buying a loaf of bread.”

We decided that Saint Germain-en-Laye is too far from my wife’s parents and too far from Paris. Having to take the bus to the train station is a pain, especially when in some neighborhoods the last bus is at 7:45pm!

We found a home we really liked in Chaville. The asking price was a bit out of our range but I was hoping for the standard 50k reduction that we’ve been observing on all houses. See most home sellers want to move in the summer during the school break. So they put their houses up early, at a premium, hoping to snag a desperate or unsuspecting buyer. The houses are generally 50k euros overpriced. They don’t sell (usually) and the price is lowered until it does. So we were ready to make our first offer.

Here are a few photos (not mine) just to give you an idea. Hopefully this will be useful to someone interested in housing in the Paris area (please let me know if this is the case).

house_front
back yard

I called them back to make an appointment to visit the house with my wife’s parents and he told me elle est vendue (”it’s sold”). Really they should have told us that when we were visiting it, it would have saved us a few late night discussions. But it was a good exercise. Because now we will be ready. The asking price through their real estate agent was quite high but they put an ad out in the PAP (a for sale by owner type website) for less (saving money on the commissions). An agent we are working with told us it later sold out of our price range. Ouch. It was probably worth it so now we’re reevaluating our price range to see if we can come up with a little more.

Now we’re on a four day holiday weekend and it’s very calm. Hopefully there’ll be more homes coming on the market next week. For the moment there are no prospects meeting our criteria.

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