The Presidential Elections have finished and summer is looming. This is always a busy time for us with a mixture of genuine house-hunters and a few holiday makers who think that it may be worth investingating the fantasy of owning a home overseas. The numbers of British citizens living overseas continues to grow, and it is interesting for us to note some who purchsed intially in Spain now moving to France and vice-versa.

Undoubtedly, the low-cost airlines have fuelled the explosion of interest in this area – we have in 2007 three regional airports at Poitiers, La Rochelle & Angouleme receiving flights from the UK & Ireland. In addition within a 2 hour drive we also have Bordeaux, Nantes and Limoges, meaning that it is possible to fly into this region from practically anywhere in the UK.

Many of our clients took advice from our special interim newsletter earlier this year and locked into a very attractive £ Sterling rate (over 1.50 at the time) to secure their Euros for their proposed purchase. If you missed that opportunity, do please still speak to our experts by clicking on the link in this margin.

If you are planning a viewing visit soon, please book your time with us as soon as possible. Our team will always try to accommodate viewings at short notice, but often our diaries are booked a full week in advance. We also feel that we can make a better selection for you if we are given adequate notice, so please help us to help you. Contact us for appointments as early as possible.

We are a little surprised at peoples reluctance to use a service called Skype. This is a simple programme to run on your PC (using a headset and microphone), enabling you to call anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world free of charge, whilst connected to the internet. There are some other useful things you can do on Skype that are not free (but they are pretty cheap, actually). This service is ideal for talking to Agents such as ourselves, enabling us to communicate between each other without watching costs, and of course your friends and family (whether here in France or in the UK). It really is a "win / win" deal for everyone concerned.

Now to our selected properties, this time divided into 2 sections, the first being Summer Sales, featuring several properties significantly reduced in price to sell quickly. The second section highlights what we think are the best of the rest across a selection of prices, being great value for money.