Our Dream Apartment

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“It’s now or never,” I said to my friend Patsy. “We’ve sold the house in Vermont and we have a little extra cash: it’s time to stop fantasizing about that apartment in Paris and take the plunge.  Are you up for this?” Patsy wasn’t so sure.  We did have some cash from the house in Vermont, but Paris is far from our home in Provence and a Paris apartment would probably gobble up our minuscule profit from Vermont before we could say “le living room.”  Besides, we already had one house in France. Taking on a second piece of French real estate might complicate our lives horrendously.  “Think of the plumbers,” said Patsy.  “Think of the carpenters and the electricians.”  Patsy’s arguments were entirely reasonable, but for me Paris is not a subject for reason. “I love Paris in the springtime,” I began to sing.  “I love Paris in the fall. I love Paris in the winter…” “OK, OK, I get it,” she said. “We’re talking about a love affair, not a rational decision.  And that Vermont money is burning a hole in your pocket.” “Maybe we could find an apartment that we could rent out to tourists,” I said, making a tepid stab at rationality.  “Maybe we could make money.” Patsy was dubious.  “I don’t think so.  Tourists stay in hotels, not apartments.  And I don’t want to run a hotel.” But if I learned one lesson in my former career as a lawyer it is that “no” is not an answer. “We could just go and look,” I argued. Then I added, “Think April in Paris. Even if we don’t find an apartment, we’ll have a wonderful time. And if we look at a bunch of apartments we’ll get to know the city from the inside out. And don’t forget,” I concluded, pulling out my trump card, “We could have dinner at Le Grand Colbert!”  (Le Grand Colbert is a smashingly beautiful, recently restored Belle Epoque brasserie that serves excellent food in a bustling, highly sophisticated Parisian setting.  Patsy and I get a high just from walking in the front door.) Le Grand Colbert did the trick.  She began to weaken, and I pressed my advantage. “We’ll just go to look,” I said.  “We need to get a feel for the market.”  “Well,” she said, “Maybe an exploratory trip.” Then she frowned darkly. “But we’re not writing any checks!  You’ve got to promise!”  And so, with a firm commitment to remain non-committal, we made our plans to spend a week in Paris in early April. Buying real estate in France is very different from buying real estate in America.  Contrary to what many people think, there are no restrictions against Americans acquiring property here in France, but the laws relating to taxes and inheritance are not at all the same in the two countries.  Being reasonably sober and responsible, we made our decision to buy an apartment after consulting with a French notaire.  We asked him a battery of questions about taxes and inheritance (including the taxes we would have to pay if we sell the property) and asked him about possible forms of ownership. Then we checked his answers with a second notaire.    It goes without saying that any American who buys property in France needs to make decisions that are individually designed for the buyer’s specific circumstances and even then only after a careful consultation with a French notaire. But let us not discuss about French Real Estate and Tax Law as Applied to Americans.  We’ll talk about what we did and why we did it and why the first thing we did when we got Paris was purchase a copy of a publication called “Particulier à  Particulier,” which means “Private Party to Private Party.” Particulier à Particulier (P/P) is the principal tool used by Parisians to buy and sell residential real estate.  P/P has a web site that is updated daily, a weekly print edition that appears on the newsstands every Thursday, and a huge following among local people.  According to Le Monde Economique more than half of all residential property in Paris is sold through P/P, and P/P quickly introduced us to Paris prices.  We discovered that an apartment with two bedrooms in one of the lively neighborhoods in the center of town could easily cost $500,000.  The price would be almost as high in an “interesting” (seedy) or “elegant,” (far away, boring, bourgeois) neighborhood outside of the center. Apartments in the really choice neighborhoods in the center of town, for example around St.-Germain-des-Près, could go for multiples of that figure.           In the middle of our search we decided to call our Boston friends Joan and Jean-François.  Jean- François is a Belgian who, like me, has always dreamed of owning a place in Paris; Joan is American and open-minded. “Maybe we’ll go in with you,” said Jean-François.  “I’ll be in Paris next month; why don’t we look together?” Joan and Jean-François have been our close friends for years, and the decision to join forces with them was not difficult.  We happily curtailed our adventures in the apartment trade, and a few weeks later we began our second round of apartment visits, this time with the help of Jean-François. P/P once again provided us with a shopping list. On our first day we saw a two-bedroom apartment at the bottom of the 15th arrondisement (almost at the Péréphérique–the ring road that surrounds Paris, from which one heads off into the hinterland–miles from the center of town) with a living room that stared blankly out at a faceless, modern apartment building and a kitchen that looked down upon rows of dazzling white crosses in a military cemetery.  (Imagine breakfast croissants accompanied by visions of death?) The apartment had low ceilings, cramped spaces and ancient fixtures; it would need a complete rehab and would cost $430,000. We visited a two-bedroom apartment at the west end of the Blvd. St.-Germain.  By craning our necks we could see the Seine, but the tiny rooms had low ceilings, the apartment needed renovation from top to bottom (it had an avocado-green bathtub and a flesh-pink bidet), the building’s public spaces were dark and depressing, and the neighborhood was filled with wholesale hardware stores. The owner wanted $450,000. “Are the prices negotiable?” I asked a friend after seeing a few of these horrors.  “These people have got to be smoking dope!” Our friend…
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