We live near quite a small town, about 3000 residents including those of us who squeeze into the surrounding fields. All the same, our town has most facilities that you want – primary school, 2 supermarkets, DIY store, 2 butchers, bars and restaurants and so on. And four estate agents.
A few years ago when we arrived the town had just one estate agent – how did they manage. Then, every year or two since another has opened – the most recent opened its doors just a few weeks ago. Well choice is good I suppose. But of course opening lots of estate agents doesn’t increase the choice of properties, it just spreads the properties around a bit.
There might, I suppose, be slight differences in the commissions they charge but I would guess these differences are marginal – most of the extortionate cost of buying a property in France ends up in the hands of the government, or as charges levied by the ‘union of estate agents’ or whatever they call themselves, so will be difficult to reduce very much.
So why not open an estate agent myself? Must be easy money, I like the sound of that. Well for the benefit of those of you hoping to start an estate agent in France I’ll give you a couple of clues why not.
- If you are not a French registered estate agent you will need to work with someone who is. You will likely not be able to become a registered estate agent yourself because it is a highly regulated (protectionist) industry. So your role will be to introduce clients to a French estate agent. They will want to share the income, I imagine.
- If you have an idea for a business that is new and exciting, or you can offer an original idea or angle on things, it should work. But if your business idea is to wait until the property market has passed its peak, when there are less houses for sale and less people wanting to buy them, and then join the crowds in opening an estate agent to try and sell them…well there are aspects of that plan that could be criticised.
But all is not lost. I’ll give you a clue how to make it work, which I would do myself if I had the time and the inclination.
Almost all local estate agents in France have terrible websites, infrequently updated, that fail miserably to appear in the google search results. So if you are planning to be an estate agent, all you need is
(1) a good, professionally designed website to list the properties
(2) an expert who can get you to rank first on google for your local town eg ‘property for sale in Sare’ – this will not be difficult to do. You need to rank for each of the three or four small towns in your area.
People who search for expressions like ‘property in France’ are just surfing the internet. People who actually plan to buy something search for more specific phrases – like ‘property for sale in Sare’ or even ’2 bedroom house for sale in countryside near Sare’ – it is these longer, more obscure phrases that you are interested in – and luckily they are also easier to show up in the search engine results for.
(3) a well-lit office with a coffee machine and a happy smile (this is why I can’t do it myself, I fall down at the last hurdle)
Of course I can’t promise it will work but I am pretty sure it will be a couple of thousand euros very well spent.
Good luck, let me know how it goes!
Hi Mr B,
Excellent post. I subscribe to your feed for exactly that reason. There are very often gems like this one. It particularly resonated because I work for a well known agency operating in the Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne. I’m one of those wjhose role it is to introduce clients to the agency and take a share of the commision in return. My partner and I have just launched a new website with a lot of what you talk about in mind. It fact, it’s the second iteration of the site. The first was written with those who use keywords like ‘property in france’ in mind. I’m not sure if we have it right this time but I would be extremely grateful if you could quickly cast an eye over it. If you’re not too far away I’ll buy you lunch!
Hi
I had a quick look at your site – what a great design, very attractive and easy to use. I wish I had talent like that. Congratulations!!
Two general comments I could make:
- for each page (property) you need to think ‘what will people be searching for in google to find this page’. I think people looking for your properties will search ‘property for sale Dordogne’, ‘property for sale Lot et Garonne’ ‘property in Monpazier’ etc so it is imperative that words like ‘for sale’ or ‘property for sale’ appear on each property page, preferably also in the ‘title tag’ of the page.
Second comment is more of a personal preference – I think every page of a property website should have a photo of a property. So on the homepage I would make ‘new properties’ the default rather than ‘featured properties’, and on individual property pages I would have ‘pictures’ as default rather than ‘map’ – it took me a while to see that pictures were available.
Our email address is on the ‘about me’ page if you want to ask anything more specific but don’t want my reply to be public!
Looking at the area you cover I suspect you must practically live in my garden.
Cheers!!
A very interesting post. I am currently a real estate agent in Canada, which is quite a different concept to a estate agent in the U.K. I have experienced the real estate in France as we recently purchased a property there. It is something I have considered doing when we eventually get there so it was interesting to read from that aspect. I will keep in mind what you say, I must say the website issue had occured to me aswell as it can be discouraging to keep looking through very old listings.
The French are, to say the least, rather protective about their industries – pharmacies, notaires, estate agents, even food shops, prices are all very regulated and the industries are hard to enter for an outsider. This lack of competition is very bad for the consumer of course and perhaps one day President Sarkozy will do something about it.
Meanwhile good luck if you go ahead with your plans, it’s a lovely country and worth the effort!
Incidentally I just checked and this blog entry is currently first in google for ‘houses for sale in Sare, France’ – so the principle works! You just need to do the same for lots of similar phrases…