£50,000 challenge!
A home set in majestic mountain scenery was the dream for Charles King, but could he find a suitable property in France for his extremely tight budget?
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View from the summit of Puy-de-Dôme lava dome M
y challenge was to buy a house for £50,000. Was it possible? Was there
anywhere where you could still do it? It’s the kind of adventure that might make for a daytime TV show. I grew up in Ireland, but for
a long time I’ve been trying to buy a home in Kent, where I’ve lived for 15 years. As a single, self-employed person, I was struggling to find properties I’d like to live in within my budget, and was finding the process somewhat disheartening. In March 2019, after a holiday
with friends in Spain in the village where they had bought a house some years earlier, I returned to the UK asking myself the question: was there anywhere left in Europe where I could still buy a property for the price of a deposit for a house in Kent? I reasoned that even if I ended
up spending many more years renting in Kent, I might at least own something that wouldn’t cost me a great deal of money in the meantime, and could eventually be a retirement property. I imagined working between the two countries and hopefully building a social life in the new location
in preparation for eventually moving there full time. I began looking online with an initial budget of £30,000.
WHERE TO BUY? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there were cheap properties in my native Ireland but the market there had recovered sufficiently for my budget to be too small. Ideally, I didn’t want to be
too far away from the UK. While my trip to Spain had inspired the search, I’m not a huge fan of hot weather. I had a brief look online at Greek properties but again the heat was an issue and the distance from England considerable. I searched listings in Italy
where I found some very cheap
“Montluçon is a charming town with a medieval ducal palace overlooking a fountain-lined boulevard”
properties, but I was worried that with my small budget, I might end up in an unsavoury neighbourhood and not realise until it was too late. I looked a little at Eastern Europe but struggled with my complete lack of knowledge of the languages on the websites and felt out of my depth with not knowing anything about the countries, let alone which areas might be suitable. Then I started looking
at France. I had initially assumed it would be more expensive than Spain and so was pleasantly surprised to find many properties available within my budget. I should mention that I have worked as an estate agent for many years and therefore have some knowledge of the British property market. In my experience, a cheap
74 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: May/June 2024 Charles King had a £50,000 budget
property can be found in any region but there will usually be good reasons why it’s cheaper
than the average. Therefore, what I was looking for was a place where there are many properties in my budget and I could have some choice. I wanted to find somewhere where local people routinely paid these comparatively small amounts of money for their houses and apartments.
CENTRE OF ATTENTION In France, the highest concentration of cheaper properties seemed to be in the centre. Although I had visited France many times and spoke a reasonable amount of French, I didn’t know the centre at all. The main town in the area where I was finding the most listings for houses in my budget was Montluçon in the Allier department. Google and Wikipedia
searches described it as a sort of old industrial town. I didn’t have romantic notions about how it might look, but the only
© CHARLES KING
© SHUTTERSTOCK
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