Google Can Find You a House in France. That’s the Easy Part

Travel agents were supposed to disappear

A funny thing has happened to travel agents. They were supposed to disappear. Once we had Google, Booking.com, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, YouTube, Instagram and several million people willing to tell us where they had the best pizza of their lives, what possible purpose could a travel agent still serve? And now, of course, we have AI, which can produce a three-week itinerary through Tuscany before you have finished your morning coffee.

Except travel advisers are still very much around, particularly when people are planning expensive, complicated or important trips. And when I thought about why, I realised that the answer explains quite a lot about buying property in France too.

Because information was never really the difficult part.

Finding houses is ridiculously easy

I can find you 300 houses in France this afternoon. You can find them yourself, actually. SeLoger, LeBonCoin, Green-Acres and dozens of estate-agency websites will happily provide enough property listings to prevent you from doing anything useful for the rest of the week. The real problem is deciding which ones matter.

It is rather like travel. If I want a hotel in Rome, I don’t need somebody to tell me that Rome contains hotels. What I would quite like is someone who understands what I enjoy, knows the city properly and can say: that one looks fantastic online, but I don’t think you’ll like the location. This one is less glamorous, but you’ll walk out every morning and immediately feel you’re in Rome.

That is interpretation, and interpretation becomes more valuable, not less, when information becomes abundant.

Too much information can make you less certain

The same thing happens when somebody starts thinking seriously about France. At first, the internet is wonderful. You discover towns you had never heard of. You compare prices. You read blogs. You join Facebook groups. You ask ChatGPT where you should live.

Then something slightly alarming happens: everybody has an answer.

Move to the Dordogne. Absolutely not, too many English people. Try Provence. Provence is overpriced. The Lot is authentic. The Lot is too remote. Uzès is perfect. Uzès is full of tourists. Live near Bordeaux. Don’t live anywhere near Bordeaux.

After a while, you may know considerably more about France and feel considerably less certain about what you should actually do. That is one of the strange features of modern property searching: scarcity of information has disappeared, but clarity has not.

The real job is interpretation

This is where I think the travel-agent analogy becomes useful. A good travel adviser does not own the hotels, fly the aircraft or manufacture Italy. Their value is in understanding the traveller, knowing the possibilities, filtering them and assembling something that makes sense for that particular person.

Property advice should work much the same way.

An estate agent has properties to sell. Google has information. AI has extraordinary information-processing capacity. Facebook has opinions, an unlimited renewable resource apparently. But none of those automatically starts with you.

And that matters because the first question in a French property search is not really “What house should I buy?” It is “What kind of life am I trying to create?”

Start with the life, not the house

Do you want to walk to restaurants, or would you happily drive twenty minutes for dinner in exchange for land and silence? Do you want a lively town throughout the winter, or are you perfectly content somewhere that becomes very quiet outside summer? Is proximity to an airport genuinely important, or merely something that sounds important on the spreadsheet? How much renovation do you really want once the charming idea of restoring an old farmhouse turns into eighteen months of builders?

These are not questions a property portal can answer. Sometimes even you don’t know the answers at the beginning, and that is completely normal.

People often imagine that they should arrive in France with a perfect brief: three bedrooms, pool, village edge, forty minutes from an airport, €650,000 maximum, thank you very much. Then they start looking and discover that the village they adored on holiday feels slightly dead in February. They realise that the house with two hectares means getting into the car every single time they want a coffee. They discover that they don’t actually care much about having a pool but absolutely love being able to walk to a market.

The brief changes because the buyer learns. That process of learning is not a failure of preparation. It is the preparation.

Good advice should occasionally annoy you

And it is also why useful advice should involve rather more than sending listings. A good adviser should challenge assumptions, explain trade-offs and occasionally say something you don’t particularly want to hear.

The spectacular house is probably too isolated for the life you described. The famous village may be a wonderful place to visit but an unnecessarily expensive place to live. The slightly less glamorous town ten kilometres away may actually work much better.

This is where experience counts. Not because an adviser has some secret database unavailable to mere mortals, but because seeing many different buyers make many different decisions creates pattern recognition. You begin to understand the difference between what people say they want and what eventually makes them happy.

Yes, I know this sounds self-serving

Of course, this is the point at which I should acknowledge that I make my living doing precisely this, so you may reasonably accuse me of marking my own homework.

Fair enough. But I use advisers myself when the stakes justify it. Years ago I considered buying on the Greek island of Naxos. I did plenty of research and even made a heroic, largely unsuccessful attempt to learn some Greek. But I would never have bought property there without somebody local, bilingual and experienced beside me.

Not because I am incapable of using Google, but because Greece isn’t my terrain. France may not be yours either.

Information is cheap. Judgment is not.

There has never been more information available to somebody considering a move here, and that is a good thing. Use it. Read, explore, ask AI questions, study maps, compare properties and become an informed buyer.

But don’t confuse having more information with having reached a decision.

Finding houses is easy now. Figuring out which life, and therefore which house, actually fits you is still the interesting part.

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