International Parents seeks to both stop short and go further than Frenchparents.

• To stop short of giving detailed local advice by major city worldwide, as is done elsewhere on the Web and as Frenchparents aims to do for San Francisco.
• To go further by enabling members to keep in touch and connect, both near home and across the globe, according to their interests, their native cultures, and their children’s ages.
  The anti model is Facebook, the supermarket of online networks, where one finds everyone and everything.

International Parents is:

• Both local and global, being organized by major city worldwide- à la CraigsList
• Highly respectful of members’ privacy and intimacy – identities are not visible to non members
• Set in a colorful setting, making for a warmer, in my view more feminine approach
• Not based on a volume, pure advertising model but on a qualitative, premium membership approach
• Membership is on a by invitation basis only

International Parents has also been designed to help professionals offering the products and services you seek and need as global parents to connect with you, because you are hard to find and so are they!

We love it when people contact us to be local representatives for the network.

Looking forward to seeing you on International Parents, Frenchparents members! The invitation link will go out soon.

Finally, she’s proposing to offer, for major cities worldwide:

• Travel info suited to families
  IE, not your typical: best restaurants and great museums, but rather, restaurants, outings and activites children or teenagers will enjoy.

• Text guides we can print out or have on our mobile devices with child-specific content, to give children and teenagers information and games they’ll be interested in, at last…

She’s asking all international families to answer this survey to help her assess your needs better. It’s here- and its in French. Thanks for taking 5 minutes to respond!

FEES:

There are fees of course:

• Homes are not all listed in all real estate agencies. I know of one network, ORPI, that lists its properties through all its network’s agencies, but this is a recent and novel approach.

• Agency fees are about 6% (but run from 5% to 10% depending on the price of the home)

• State fees are about 8% on homes more than five years old, and 4% on recent homes.

So that’s right there between 10% and 14% of the house’ s cost in fees!

Then there’s the administrative hassles.

LEGAL and ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTRAINTS :

Think you’d like to renovate, and maybe add some rooms to your new property? You’ll have to ask for a building permit ( ‘permis de construire’), which may take up to 3 months to be granted or refused, for reasons you often do not completely understand.

There are rules pertaining to the land you may be buying, restricting how much you can enlarge the home. In one instance, even though the house is on 5 800 square meters of land, ten minutes from a city, the only possibility is to enlarge up to twice the size of the existing home. In this case it was not a huge home, with 170 square meters. This means the owners can only up to 85 square meters to the home, leaving a huge part of the land unused for housing- thereby reducing its value.

Information on the land and the home is supposed to be maintained by the local town hall ( at what is called ‘ le cadastre’) , but it is often incomplete and not considered as legal proof.

In conclusion, be forewarned, buying a home in France is an adventure!

France Home Finance is a Paris-based company I’m familiar with who helps non resident buyers find loans.

- > Here’s a good page they have on buying a home in France.

We finally found a house to rent in the end, at the end of June.  We were supposed to move in in July- it was about time!  Only thing is, the house was occupied until… September 3rd.  And holiday seasons ends in August, both for work and for school. Our children were going back to school August 29 to be exact.  After a few days, we were able to negociate an August 25 move in date, but by that time, our movers had filled all their delivery slots and we could only get our things delivered August 27th.:-/

On top of this, we were expected on the other side of France, about 7 to 8 hours away by car, for a wedding in the family August 30 th!  Yes!  How convenient.  So we barely had time to open up some boxes before we hopped into the car for a day-long drive, slept, went to the wedding, slept, and drove back the following mornig.

Finally, we could look forward to a weekend’s worth of unpacking, before school started and work started again…And we unpacked, threw away yet more things, and put the remaining items away ever so neatly.

Now, we didn’t have a phone line at that time.  Did I mention the house is brand new?  Although this could sound as a positive point, here it translates into: it don’t work yet. No phone, no TV antenna, unfinished cupboards, water mysteriously seeping through the floor in various rooms…

The phone story, still unraveling at the time of writing, could make a hilarious Charlie Chaplin movie.  Enter the phone company technician.  Which, by the way, in socialism-ridden France, is NOT an employee of France Telecom, the monopoly provider for land lines, but an outside contractor.  Well well. So much for state-sponsored entreprises with generous worker conditions.

Phone technician is a comical character- if you don’t have to depend on him.  He never comes at the time of the appointment, never appologizes, always complains about the way the wires were laid, about the way his colleague works, and can’t refrain from SHOUTING in your home.Poor guy, he was out of luck with us.  After two unsuccessful tries at trying to locate where to link the house to the phone network, and beaucoup de moaning and complaining, we find out the needed elements had been buried in the ground and covered with grass… Believe it, it’s true.  So he comes back a third time, and there, succeeds in linking the house to the main network, but…Alas, there is a problem on the other side now, with the main network.  And so ten days after having started to pay rent on a house in the middle of nowhere, we are still phoneless, with limited hope of ever having access to such a modern luxury.

I’ll spare you the details on the green pool water we had to deal with the day of the signing, the real estate agent who counts the number of lightbulbs in the house, should we steal them, but cannot explain how anything in the house works, the 20 page move-in inventory (for an unfurnished, four bedroom home)…I’ll also pass on the high tech dishwasher we mastered after two days of head bashing and a call to the owners, who knew the ‘ trick’ to get it to finally start, as well as having no washing machine for 7 days after the movers damaged it.

I will say the countryside is beautiful, the weather wonderful, and our neighbours very welcoming.

Let’s just say, moving in in Aix en Provence, and in the South of France in general, is something which has to be earned.

However in my recent experience of moving within France, it seems to me the moving staff could adopt a more people-focused attitude to make the experience a little less stressful.

Some of the tricks we felt were played on us were:

• The Coat Disappearing trick :

If you’ve moved with professionals who pack your items before, you know its essential to isolate all the items you want to take directly with you prior to the moving day, lest they be packed up before you have time to say: “NO, not thaaaaat!”

Well, despite my experience of such matters I was a victim of ‘the coat trick’. The evening before our move, I’d hung my rain coat in the usual coat closet it goes in, this being Paris in August, it was raining! I hadn’t not realized we were on the eve of a hurricane sweeping the appartment. So when the following evening, after the movers had packed most everything, I went to get my c… The closet was empty.

You’d think this has happened to others than myself, and these individuals who have experienced this before might ask before packing coats: ” Are you sure you don’t need this?”

• The Internet Connection trick

I’d clearly indicated not to pack up the ADSL modem and telephone unit until the very last minute, for obvious reasons… But there was another unit connected to these items, an odd French creation called the Minitel. One of the movers clearly wanted to pack this item urgently, and proceeded to disconnect all the telephone equipment. They were plugged into a multiple outlet.

Why in this case, pack the Minitel WITH the multiple outlet, I asked? WHY? Was it not clear that there were at least two pieces of equipment( the phone and the modem) that needed to remain plugged in for the two to remain active?

Ahhh, that’s how it goes folks. Just a few tricks among the series that were played on us upon our latest move. Messieurs les movers, just maintain a little human touch and judgement and things will be so much nicer.