After UK Press reports of Britons being caught in the property trap in Spain, Tony Todd asks if the same thing could happen in France.
FRANCE is a much safer bet for property investment than Spain, according to the London-based international estate agents’ firm Savills.
This could explain why France last year overtook Spain for the first time in interest from British buyers looking for a first or second home on the continent through the firm.
“A quarter of all enquiries at Savills for property abroad is now in France,” said international division head Harry Lewis, adding that “the Spanish market has been hit very badly in the last year.”
Spain’s infamous “Land Grab” laws have much to do with this - in recent years thousands of British expats have discovered, to their horror, that the dream retirement home they poured all their money into was illegally built on protected land.
Some have found they could not sell their properties, while others have had to watch bulldozers raze their properties.
Many are facing ongoing worry and uncertainty - out of 262,000 Britons registered in the 2006 census as living in Spanish coastal areas, 105,000 live in Alicante, Valencia and Castellon, the areas most affected by the legal problems.
They blame unscrupulous property developers and lawyers lulling hapless Brits - who often do not speak Spanish or understand the intricacies of local planning laws - into a false sense of security.
For years the Spanish authorities turned a blind eye to rampant development which drove property prices up and has all but destroyed the natural beauty of the Spanish Mediterranean coast.
In the last year Spain has started putting on the brakes - and this includes the destruction of illegally-built properties. Its decade-long construction boom has come to a staggering halt.
About 40,000 Spanish estate agents - about half the total - have gone out of business in the last year.
The government has also cracked down on town halls issuing illegal permits for backhanders.
Marbella's entire city council was dismissed last year for corruption and money laundering that saw the construction of 30,000 illegal homes.
Many expatriates find themselves in properties that are illegal - even though they thought they had valid planning permission.
Could the same thing happen in France?
The answer appears to be an almost uniform "no" - but there is an exception.
Le Lavandou, in the Var near Toulon and Hyères, is the scene of a major judicial experiment in the application of the Loi Littoral coastal development law.
This was bought in in the mid-1980s to prevent the wholesale destruction of the coastline as has happened in Spain.
At Le Lavandou, planning permission was given for the construction of more than 80 homes in the late 1990s.
The owners, mostly families and retired French couples, set about building them.
A local environmental group then challenged the legality of the permits, citing the Loi Littoral, and permission to continue building the houses was retrospectively declared illegal.
The homeowners are now living in half-finished houses. They are barred from doing any work on them and cannot sell them legally.
Bernard Masier, 70, and his wife got planning permission to build their dream retirement home at Le Lavandou in the late 1990s.
The former construction manager said: “We live in a building site.
“I am not allowed to complete any of the work on my house because permission was annulled.
“I scrimped and saved all my life to build this home. I pay taxes on this property as habitable but as far as the application of the Loi Littoral is concerned it may as well not exist. It's making me and my wife ill.”
Mr Masier said although he was burdened by an "absurd" situation, he was luckier than some, especially some young couples with children, who are paying a mortgage on a house they cannot live in.
He said: "We are a test case to see how the Loi Littoral can be applied. We’re hostages to circumstances beyond our control."
An association of affected property owners is appealing the Loi Littoral decision, ten years after the original permission was granted.
The situation at Le Lavandou is unique in France.
It was made a test case after pressure from local green campaigner Martine Lafontaine.
Mayor Gil Bernadi claims the planning permission he issued was legal at the time but, because the Loi Littoral is “complicated and open to interpretation,” there is little he can do about the permits being made retrospectively illegal.
John Wright, a Scottish-born estate agent who lives in Normandy, said the application of the Loi Littoral was something that prospective homeowners should bear in mind when buying property.
He said: "This law has been in place for almost 20 years and notaires and planners should know about it and tell you if you're buying a property somewhere that is affected.
"But on the whole, France is a much safer bet for buying property than Spain.
"I don't think anything as bad as the Spanish situation could ever happen in France - but people should still go into things with their eyes open.”
Apart from the “land-grab” issue, France’s property market shows more consistency in house prices, according to Savills’ Mr Lewis.
A few years ago prices were rising rapidly there, but that is no longer the case, especially in the South.
“France has a much longer proven track record of gradual increases,” he said.
“For a good long term gain on a property investment, France is a better option than Spain.”
