Before listening to the podcast, please watch the video below, while reading the lyrics in French and English underneath it. Once you know the song and its meaning, the lesson in the podcast will be much more interesting and effective.
In this first lesson, we will use a song with a fitting name: Paroles… words and promises. The singer is the Egyptian born Italian and nationalized French singer ‘Dalida’. She was enormously popular in the seventies but had a tragic life, ending in suicide in the mid-eighties. In this song we also hear the voice of Alain Delon, a very famous French actor born in 1935 who now lives in Switzerland. Smooth talker Alain is trying to seduce her, but she’s not having it. She knows that although he tries to woo her with romantic talk, it is just words and empty promises: paroles.
Selling a house is an art in itself. An important part of the job is real estate communication. For houses in France this is a lot more complex than in many other European countries. The market in France is much less transparent, with real estate agents trying to outdo each other and also having to compete with both the notaries and their clients: the private sellers themselves. After all, many owners try to save 5 to 6% commission by finding a buyer themselves – without a broker.
A real estate agent in France costs the seller between 4% and – in the case of cheaper houses – as much as 10% of the selling price. While in the Netherlands as a seller you only pay 1% to 1.5%. Why is the estate agent so expensive in France? Does he or she deliver so much more quality? The sales advertisements produced by the real estate agents do not reflect this. A superior quality is obviously not the reason for the high price of the French broker. We will gladly explain it to you.
Move to France and live like a Burgundian… now this might be possible even with a limited budget. Especially in view of the still relatively modest property prices in France. In the more rural areas, a sum less than a 100,000 euros will get you a very charming independent home sitting on a nice piece of land. This while many people in the UK own a house that has become much more valuable in the past ten years. A surplus value of a few hundred thousand pounds is no exception! This is why more and more people decide: “Cash in and check out! We are moving to France!” They sell their old house and