Until council elections are cancelled, then it’s not very democratic at all.
Privatisation of building regulations, and outsourcing planning more like.
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I think @Corona was being mischievous.
Until their hand is forced by developers who twist the rules just enough so that their “profit” might be reduced.
Switching track back to mortgages - France has a somewhat dated approach to personal credit (as has been noted in this thread and previous ones) - but that did not stop it suffering just as badly as everyone else following the 2007/2008 crash so I wonder what it gained by being so restrictive.
Are house prices in France more affordable than those in the UK as a result - not sure reall, we were idly looking at current prices in Vannes and were gobsmacked just how high they seem to be and the Notaires report
seems to show most areas with median prices above that of the UK as a whole (about 231,000€) or even Birmingham (average £246,670 or 296,000€).
So, as I said, I’m wondering where the advantage lies.
But are you comparing like for like? I seem to remember that the UK has the smallest property sizes so you need to look a price per metre squared to get sense of the equivalence.
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…& UK estate agents are masters of the fish-eye lens!
It does but I don’t think French houses being 1.2x larger automatically makes them 1.2x more expensive - after all it is still “a house”. Also France has 2x the land area that the UK does so it’s not surprising properties are a little larger on average.
I think one could spend a lot of time analysing differences, and relative sizes of countries isn’t really that important as more useful is what amount can be built on. All I know for sure is that French friends who have moved to the UK over the years have been horrified by how expensive property is!
“How do property prices in the UK compare to those of the rest of the world? We estimated the average cost of a city-centre 2-bed flat in 98 countries to find out.
The global average cost of a 2-bedroom flat is £176,000. The UK was the 15th most expensive place to buy a property, with an average price for a 2-bedroom flat at £287,000. This is 64% higher than the global average across all countries analysed.”
These days they use rectilinear wide-angles which don’t curve the image in at the corners so much, thus making the room look bigger without so much of the give-away fishy distortion. Phones often have a wide-angle lens that’s roughly the equivalent of 13mm on a full-frame 35mm camera.
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One of my reasons for planning a move to France is that my budget (about £100 - £120k) doesn’t buy anything more than a holiday chalet anywhere south of Birmingham. 
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Just to deviate a bit, if anyone is planning on buying a *ark home in the UK,be very afraid! I watched Rip Off Britain one morning this week and there was a big report into these homes and how people have lost life savings, been ripped off and worse. I was under the impression these sites and mobile homes were relatively safe, but no and there are many many upset owners out there. France has some bargains if you plan to do a long term renovation mostly yourself and inland away from the coastal areas there are many affordable properties not needing too much doing.
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Absolutely right - I looked at those (briefly!) and the “site charges” are utterly extortionate - many thousands of pound a year. And the value isn’t what you (or your heirs) think it should be when you come to sell.
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Nothing particularly nice, I agree but if you just want a roof over your head that’s probably doable.
To be fair many (not all, by any means) French properties in that price range will need quite a lot of renovation and are not necessarily that attractive to the French as a result.
But, equally, if you want a house in Vannes under 145k€ (to match your £120k) this is all I can find at the moment
Why Vannes? - No reason except that our place is in the Morbihan and therefore it’s our regional capital and a small French city with (I assumed, perhaps wrongly) no real distinguishing features so I thought it a good benchmark for property prices.
There aren’t even that many apartments below 145k€
My point is that if you want to buy a house somewhere that there are jobs France might not be much less expensive than the UK.
If you are retired and don’t mind, especially if you are British and quite like the sort of rural property that the French themselves don’t find that interesting then, yes, you can still pick up some bargains.
The map only shows cities, where property prices are very much higher than in the countryside. Most people here I think live rurally and wouldn’t have paid anywhere near those sort of prices, I know I didn’t and I have a modern house in a small village 50% bigger than my old stone draughty not very well insulated house in rural Yorkshire. And I paid about 60% of the price for my French house thanI got for my UK one.
I was going to try to make the point that more French people live in urban areas than in the UK which would skew the average prices, but looking it up it appears that the percentages for France and the UK are almost identical at 82%.
OK, that’s a fair point.
However, even in France the bulk of the population live in towns and cities.
It really depends on where you look. Although I bought in 2019, my current house was bought within that budget. It’s current valuation isn’t that much higher than that maximum in Euros. The house next door to us is up for sale at €180,000 and is bigger. They won’t get that price though we think, €160,000 is much more realistic.
Average around £7000 PA, where we initally looked. Only livable 10 months of the year and if the site owners want to charge extra for gas and or electric they can. If the *ark home gets too old they can also temove them from the site. Biggest wakeup was watching a place in the sun where the lodges were only £22k new to buy but via the site owners £122k!!
Again this varies by location. We reckon ours has probably gone up by 35-40% but we bought 10 years ago.
Overall house prices have risen ~ 30% and RPI ~25% since, so we might have bucked the trend very slightly…
Source: https://www.ceicdata.com
Yes I will be retired and British.
I am looking at Charente or Vienne, and in a small town or village, or maybe a nearby hamlet, rather than in a large town or city.
There seems to be a reasonable range of places between €80k and €120k that only need a lick of paint and maybe a new kitchen or bathroom, so as long as there isn’t a mad price spiral in the next year or two I am hopeful I will find somewhere suitable.
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Vienne, Deux Severes, Vendee can be quite cheap in the countryside. We had an MS near the Deux Sevres/Vendee border (l’Absie) which we sold in 2018. We loved the area and almost stayed there but decided we would go further south. Although it was very rural we were not far from city or coast.