Renting Accommodation in France

We lived in AirBnBs for our first 3 months in France. This had advantages: we got to know the area so could decide where we wanted to live, without being fixed into a contract / having to move all our things. However, a big drawback was that it was really hard to receive mail: the French postal service doesn’t like delivering mail to an apartment if your name is not on the postbox – we tried sticking ours on, but it was removed! This rendered all the other practicalities of moving more difficult. So, we were excited to finally start looking for a permanent place…

I imagine that it varies from agent to agent, but we found the process remarkably long and detailed – it was pretty much harder than buying a house in the UK! In all, from choosing a place to moving in took a month, though I think the August holidays were a factor in this.

At some point (occasionally even before you see a property) you will be asked to provide your ‘dossier’. This seems to require pretty much your entire life history. We were asked to fill in the following form. On the back, you can see the list of documents required, and I’ve elaborated / translated below.

ID – scans of passports, this is easy enough.

Proof of address: ‘Quittance de loyer ou taxe foncier’ – we used a council tax bill from the UK

‘Titre de séjour + carnet de travail’: We didn’t have a title de séjour at the time, so we just included my Swiss work permit.

‘Livret de famille’ (family book) – we provided our marriage certificate

Employment contract, highlighting the type of contract (CDD – contrat de durée determiné – fixed term contract or CDI contrat de durée indeterminé – permanent contract), annual salary

Salary slips for the last 3 months. I had already been working in Switzerland for more than 3 months when we moved, but otherwise I guess that UK salary slips would have been fine too.

“2 dernières avis d’imposition sur le revenu” – I can’t remember actually sending our tax returns to them, but maybe we did.

RIB (Rélève d’identité bancaire) – Summary of your banking information, This doesn’t exist in the UK but I think we just provided recent bank statements. We have since acquired a French account – the RIB just contains the name and address of the bank and our account number.

We also provided links to our glowing positive AirBnB guest reviews, and pictures of the house we own in the UK, which apparently would help us to secure the apartment (there were other people who wanted it).

Sounds like a lot? Well that was just the initial request!

Further on through the process, they decided that we had to have a French bank account, putting us in the classic catch 22 situation that it’s hard to get a bank account without an address, and vice versa. In the end, we set up an account with “Britline” (a section of Credit Agricole) – as fairly fluent French speakers, we felt bad resorting to the bank aimed at helpless Brits, but it did make it really easy to set up an account with our UK address and later move it over to our French address.

Before we moved in, we had to provide proof of insurance for the apartment, which we got through Direct Assurance (there are comparison sites like in the UK – I have now forgotten the English name of https://www.lesfurets.com/)

And then just at the last minute, they told us that we would have to pay the deposit and first months rent by cheque! Apparently this is common in France, but we didn’t have a working cheque book so we managed to convince them, after quite some debate, that we could do a bank transfer. I was half-tempted to write them a cheque with an outdated Halifax cheque book – I think they would have been happier with that, and it may have taught them that cheques are not secure!

Incidentally, we still don’t have a cheque book and so far it hasn’t been a problem – I see it as an attempt to educate the French that cheques are a bad idea. One of my colleagues sees it as a refusal to fit in with local customs.

Finally, we secured ourselves a lovely flat – hurrah!