Finally

My cousin, who works for a French estate agent, tells me that any new apartments that she sells have plans with specific numbers of lights, power points etc. Perhaps we were naïve not to have thought about that – yes – but we trusted a so-called reputable company to fit their buildings with intelligence.

My cousin also told me that normally the ‘key handover’ takes place when the property is properly finished.  At this time the locks are changed.  This makes sense – after all, how many workmen and builders have access to the place with the existing locks – especially with a holiday place where the owners are not there much of the time. But not these promoters – they say that things are done differently in their part of France (Paris being their HQ). Cutting corners are their speciality, not cutting keys !


And Finally:
We are still waiting.  What for?  For the work to be done, for an apology, for some communication, for a gesture of good will, some compensation?  How long will we be waiting?

This company are a very bad advert for French developers. I would like to stress that in no way do I think that they are a typical French developer. Having spoken to other estate agents and people who have bought French property, it seems that these are particularly unscrupulous, give the bare minimum, ignore communication and do not try to make amends when their clients are dissatisfied. 

The Estate Agents that we dealt with say these developers are a nightmare, the Management Agency have said they are bordering on dishonest and certainly extremely unscrupulous and we have not yet met or heard of anybody who has bought from them and not experienced problems.

The apartment is extremely small – that we cannot complain about as we knew the dimensions but the planning of it is completely ridiculous.

Instead of utilising space sensibly, they have wasted it.

Instead of high quality and excellent workmanship, the quality and design of our apartment has fallen far short of reasonable expectations.