Once you know where exactly you're going to be living, you can start the house-hunting offensive. This is a very daunting task, especially if this is your Year Abroad, in which case you're probably very young and have never had to do anything like this before. I was so overwhelmed that I put this off until about three weeks before I left (don't do that).
If you want, you can start with the most obvious idea of doing a general search for 'location [town/neighbourhood name]' or 'immobilier [region]'. This allows you to get a general idea of rent prices.
At this point, you're going to start seeing a lot of confusing French housing- and rent-related vocab and abbreviations, and you might take one look and want to run away, which is pretty much what I did at first. The best thing to do is look what these mean up once and make a mini glossary, as this will save you a lot of time. Here are some that come up frequently:
Once you've cast your net wide across the internet in a general search, you can narrow it down to specific renting/selling websites whose results might not have shown up in a Google search (especially if you're using a search engine in English rather than in French). Here are a few websites I found useful for searching for apartments:
Some further tips for finding accommodation that I only realised once I got to my town:
Go for a walk around the place on street view and see what there is! I noticed three different immobiliers (letting/estate agents) in town that I didn't know about after I arrived. You will discover that France is quite behind in all things electronic and internet-related, and small local agents may well not have a website, or at least a good one that comes up in your online searches. So it is definitely also worth doing some scouting on street view; you never know what might turn up if you find a small immobilier on there which you can then go and search specifically for online.
Something else I noticed in town was social housing - they have plaques up on the building with the house name as well as the name and logo of the social housing scheme of the region. This is not something I've looked very far into beyond a quick search out of curiosity (as I obviously already have somewhere to live) but it's definitely worth searching (in French) to see if anything turns up.
Lastly, just to cover all bases, check the website of the mairie of the commune in case there are low-key housing adverts. Quite often there will be some sort of advertising page, even if it's just a sort of mini yellow pages of businesses and tradesmen in town, but on your equivalent webpage there may well be a section for ads for house shares, empty flats, etc.
When you've gotten all the way up to the point of having found places you are interested in - and this will sound very obvious, especially to anyone who has rented somewhere before at home - you need to email or get in contact with as many people as possible. Once I had found somewhere I thought I could work with, I naively thought "right, job done, this is where I will be living, just got to wait for them to get back to me". Spoiler: they never got back to me. Nor did about six of the ten adverts I replied to. So don't set your heart on one place; reply to as many as possible to increase your chances of getting one of them. If you are doing a work placement that lasts for less than a year, you may also face problems like I did of people not wanting to rent to you for a contract of under twelve months, so make sure this is the first question you put to them when you get in touch; there is no point going far down the path of asking questions and arranging things if they then refuse to rent to you for only seven months. (This happened to me.)
Almost all landlords in France (or whoever you are renting the place from) will want to see a guarantor letter, and often they want your guarantor to be a French national. This can be a vicious circle if you don't know anyone French and living in France who can do this for you. What I did was get my UK bank to sign and stamp a guarantor letter for me and hoped for the best; luckily (or unluckily) my landlady asked for a caution sum of a month's rent instead of a guarantor letter. If you cannot get around it this way, there are websites and companies that offer guarantor services to people such as you and me, one example being garantme.fr (though there are many others).
Unfortunately finding somewhere to live is by no means the hardest part of moving to France, but I hope all this information I had to work through and discover myself will help to make house-hunting more efficient for you. In the next post I will move onto how to get a French bank account.
Courage!
Emily
If you want, you can start with the most obvious idea of doing a general search for 'location [town/neighbourhood name]' or 'immobilier [region]'. This allows you to get a general idea of rent prices.
At this point, you're going to start seeing a lot of confusing French housing- and rent-related vocab and abbreviations, and you might take one look and want to run away, which is pretty much what I did at first. The best thing to do is look what these mean up once and make a mini glossary, as this will save you a lot of time. Here are some that come up frequently:
- TTC = toutes taxes comprises (all taxes included)
- RDC = rez-de-chaussée (ground floor)
- Bis, ter, quater = e.g. 26a, 26b, 26c. This is how they distinguish different apartments under one house number (often called the complément in forms where you have to give your address)
- Location = renting
- Loyer = rent
- Bail = lease
- T1/T2/T3/T4 = how different sizes of apartment are distinguished, how many rooms (sometimes F rather than T)
- Plaque et hotte = hotplate and hood
- GES = gaz à effet de serre (greenhouse gases, in other words the emissions of the flat/house)
- SDB = salle de bain (bathroom)
- Non/Meublé = Un/Furnished (a lot of the time, 'furnished' flats are actually not furnished at all, so watch out)
- Honoraires à la charge du locataire = fees the renter (you) has to pay
Once you've cast your net wide across the internet in a general search, you can narrow it down to specific renting/selling websites whose results might not have shown up in a Google search (especially if you're using a search engine in English rather than in French). Here are a few websites I found useful for searching for apartments:
- leboncoin (also has a really useful instant chat feature if phone calls in French are too daunting)
- immojeune
- entreparticuliers
- avendrealouer
- parvendu
- pap.fr
- vivastreet
- unhaj
- cidj
Renting (or buying if you're moving for more than a year abroad) your own flat is also not the only possibility, especially if you're living in a bigger town with a more diverse range of possibilities. Some of these are:
- House sharing and renting out a room from a family home, for example through appartager.fr and ESPE (government-run and area-specific)
- Student or university accommodation
Go for a walk around the place on street view and see what there is! I noticed three different immobiliers (letting/estate agents) in town that I didn't know about after I arrived. You will discover that France is quite behind in all things electronic and internet-related, and small local agents may well not have a website, or at least a good one that comes up in your online searches. So it is definitely also worth doing some scouting on street view; you never know what might turn up if you find a small immobilier on there which you can then go and search specifically for online.
Something else I noticed in town was social housing - they have plaques up on the building with the house name as well as the name and logo of the social housing scheme of the region. This is not something I've looked very far into beyond a quick search out of curiosity (as I obviously already have somewhere to live) but it's definitely worth searching (in French) to see if anything turns up.
Lastly, just to cover all bases, check the website of the mairie of the commune in case there are low-key housing adverts. Quite often there will be some sort of advertising page, even if it's just a sort of mini yellow pages of businesses and tradesmen in town, but on your equivalent webpage there may well be a section for ads for house shares, empty flats, etc.
When you've gotten all the way up to the point of having found places you are interested in - and this will sound very obvious, especially to anyone who has rented somewhere before at home - you need to email or get in contact with as many people as possible. Once I had found somewhere I thought I could work with, I naively thought "right, job done, this is where I will be living, just got to wait for them to get back to me". Spoiler: they never got back to me. Nor did about six of the ten adverts I replied to. So don't set your heart on one place; reply to as many as possible to increase your chances of getting one of them. If you are doing a work placement that lasts for less than a year, you may also face problems like I did of people not wanting to rent to you for a contract of under twelve months, so make sure this is the first question you put to them when you get in touch; there is no point going far down the path of asking questions and arranging things if they then refuse to rent to you for only seven months. (This happened to me.)
Almost all landlords in France (or whoever you are renting the place from) will want to see a guarantor letter, and often they want your guarantor to be a French national. This can be a vicious circle if you don't know anyone French and living in France who can do this for you. What I did was get my UK bank to sign and stamp a guarantor letter for me and hoped for the best; luckily (or unluckily) my landlady asked for a caution sum of a month's rent instead of a guarantor letter. If you cannot get around it this way, there are websites and companies that offer guarantor services to people such as you and me, one example being garantme.fr (though there are many others).
Unfortunately finding somewhere to live is by no means the hardest part of moving to France, but I hope all this information I had to work through and discover myself will help to make house-hunting more efficient for you. In the next post I will move onto how to get a French bank account.Courage!
Emily
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