Five compelling reasons to buy the wrong house in France

IF you want to make your dream move to France a reality it’s important to ask yourself some difficult questions – if you don’t you could be heading back in a few months time.

Here property hunter, Gregory Mose, offers up some thoughts on buying a property that people may want to consider when walking around a house wondering if this is the one.

Housing markets go up and down, but some things you can always count on. Location will continue to be king, estate agents will persist in believing that any room large enough to lie down in qualifies as a ‘spacious bedroom’ and human nature will always be a buyer’s worst enemy.

The fact is, our higher brain functions evolved to accommodate lives as tribal hunter-gatherers, not as lone property investors.

As a result, we’re better at outsmarting mammoths than at picking the French farmhouse of our dreams. However savvy you may be, the following five aspects of human psychology are working against you.

1. Love conquers all – and it starts with your wallet.
House buying is a fundamentally emotional experience. We are nest builders at heart, and the minute you start focusing on a place to live, even if only during holidays, all your fears, longings and romantic notions about the world kick in.

That’s not entirely a bad thing, being a romantic is what allows you to appreciate the beauty of this country.

But your emotions can easily get the better of you, if you don’t believe it, consider that according to various studies moving house ranks up with bereavement and divorce in the list of our most stressful life events.

Fifty percent of home purchase decisions are made within moments of first seeing the property. If you find yourself misty-eyed as you approach the front door, you risk making a very large investment decision with your heart, not your head.

2. You want to like it, even if you don’t.
Property hunting can be time consuming and frustrating, and it is a process we’d all rather have behind us.

You don’t really want to be looking for the perfect maison de maître; you want to have just moved into it.

If you are at the stage of visiting a property, it means you already liked what you saw in the listing, and you do not want to be disappointed. As a result, you are predisposed to focus on the house’s strengths and ignore its weaknesses.

Psychologists call this confirmation bias, we inevitably interpret information in a way that reconfirms what we already believe. We want to have been right all along.

So while you are trying to make a rational evaluation of that lovely village house chock full of original features and French charm, your subconscious is telling you to ignore the potentially noisy neighbours and to discount the need for outside space.

Your subconscious has its finer points, but objectivity is not among them.

3. You secretly want their furniture.
Or you not-so-secretly hate it. Either way, the manner in which a house is presented will affect your judgement.

Studies show that while almost everyone believes they can look past other people’s furniture and personal belongings, in fact only 20 per cent of us actually can.

The entire profession of Home Staging has grown up around this fact and you ignore it at your peril.

A lovely 19th century armoire can evoke your dream image of a French manoir and make you see the rest of the house in a positive light, whereas a hideous sofa or collection of stuffed boar’s heads that the current owner will take with him could easily distract you from the beautiful old terra cotta floor that could be yours.

4. Your gut thinks it understands property.
We’ve all heard it a million times, ‘trust your gut instinct’. Instinct is a form of inbuilt pattern recognition which can teach us to associate two otherwise unrelated phenomena.

There is no logical reason to believe that a man with slicked-back hair and a polyester suit is untrustworthy, but most of us would be immediately on our guard if such a man were trying to sell us a used car.

He fits a previously-encountered pattern, and our instincts start screaming as soon as we run across him. We make similar subconscious associations all the time.

The problem is that your subconscious can’t discriminate between real experiences and those observed in films or imagined in books. Something as trivial as a wall colour or a fragrance can trigger associations that affect your judgement and give you a ‘gut feeling’.

That gut feeling will be based on associations that may not be relevant, and you risk ending up buying a house because it smells like your favourite primary school teacher.

5. You want ‘them’ to like you.
Your friends, your estate agent, your mother. We all seek approval from our family and peers in whatever we do.

Their voices whisper in our ears. We differ in how we wish to portray ourselves, but it’s more than likely that the image of your dream house that you carry around in your head contains elements of what you think you should want, rather than what you actually do want.

That lovely water mill may well fit the image you wish to portray of yourself to others. Your mother may love it. But do you really want to listen to rushing water all day? Will your country quilt collection survive the humidity?

Social pressure, however subtle, can play a dramatic and potentially disastrous role in your decision-making.

So what can you do to counter the dark psychological forces that are trying to squander your life savings on the wrong place in the sun? Being constantly aware of them would be a good start.

Remain honest with yourself; keep asking yourself why you are reacting positively or negatively to a given property. Self-awareness isn’t easy, nor is it always pleasant, but a lack of it can be very expensive.

Whatever you do, don’t view properties alone. The estate agent or property owner may be as friendly and honest as can be, but they have an interest in convincing you to buy the house.

Bring along someone you trust – a spouse is good, a friend is better, an independent consultant with local property knowledge is best of all. To have someone else exercising their expert judgement and giving objective advice can help you avoid the traps your own mind is waiting to spring on you.

A quality independent property hunter, in other words, a buyer’s agent who does not work for or share commissions with an estate agent representing the vendor, will cost money, typically around two to three percent of the purchase price.

That’s not cheap, but their advice can prevent you from making costly mistakes and help you recoup their fee, if not more, in the negotiation process when you’ve found the right house.

Whether you seek expert help or not, always bear in mind this from the Ann Landers’ advice column: “Rose-coloured glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams.”

Gregory Mose is a property consultant and house hunter for Pays d’Oc Property based in SW France and specializing in the Lot and Dordogne.