'It's been mad': Dordogne town's unexpected Brexit boom
Property is being snapped up in Eymet, the most English corner of the French region, as Britons make move before it’s too late
At the beginning of every year, Terrie Simpson and her fellow estate agents at Agence Eleonor, off Place Gambetta in the pretty Dordogne town of Eymet, sit down to set their annual sales targets.
By late February, they realised they had already reached more than 30% of their 2018 total. “It’s been mad,” said Simpson, who worked for Boddington’s brewery before landing in this tranquil part of south-west France from the UK 16 years ago.
“Just mad. We’ve had people coming in saying, literally: ‘We’re here for a week and by the time we leave we’d like a house.’ They want to sort things out, get in, start qualifying for residency. They feel the clock’s ticking. There’s a deadline.”
With its honeyed stones and half-timbered square, its pub, cricket club, tea rooms and Epicerie anglaise – digestive biscuits, Oxford marmalade, lime cordial and salt’n’vinegar crisps – Eymet is the most English corner of a region whose rolling hills and reliable, but not too unbearable, sun have long been popular with Brits.
A street in Eymet, France.
Sean Smith for the Guardian
About 400 of this bastide town’s 2,600 inhabitants are UK nationals – and even as older residents grow increasingly worried about their post-Brexit retirement, an unexpected pre-Brexit boom is under way, of often younger Britons keen to make the move before it could be too late.
Simpson, who before the referendum was scathing about the “sheer absurdity, the absolute idiocy” of it all, said she still felt “mortified ... even bereaved”. But, from a professional standpoint, she added: “We opened a new branch in Bergerac last month. In its first weekend, it sold three homes. We really can’t complain.”
Across the square, Jane Fraser-Bryan, of Guyenne Immobilier Properties, told the same story. “Overwhelmed isn’t the word,” she said. “We have people showing up with cash itching to buy. Interest levels are maybe 20 times normal. Winters are usually so quiet here we shut for three weeks at Christmas. This time, we had three days off.”
It’s almost as if, said Tom Campbell, “every Brit who’s ever dreamed of living on the continent but done nothing about it has woken up and thought: ‘If I don’t do it now, it’s never going to happen. Or at least, it’ll be a hell of a lot harder.’”
House-hunting near Bergerac with his partner, Ella, Campbell – an internet security specialist from Sussex who works remotely – said the aim was “to be out of Brexit Britain, registered in France, as EU citizens with a right to reside, by 29 March next year. That way, we should be OK.”
In practice, assuming the status quo transition period agreed this month comes into effect next March, British nationals looking to settle abroad, and EU citizens thinking of coming to Britain, should now have a little longer, until December 2020.
But few seem willing to take the chance. “Things haven’t exactly gone the way the government said they would so far; I don’t see why anyone would think they will now,” said Lisa Reynolds, a freelance illustrator from Birmingham, who had made an offer on a converted barn near Monpazier, 40 minutes west of Eymet.
She is hoping to move in over the summer, in time for her eldest to start primary school. “It does feel like the pressure’s on,” Reynolds said. “Yes, there’s massive uncertainty. But we’ve been coming here, talking about this, for ages. Brexit makes me so angry, but it’s forced us to take the plunge. In a way, I’m quite grateful.”
But while some scramble to make the move, many of those who already have are fretting and quietly furious. Peter Timmins took early retirement from the bank he worked for in Cheshire and moved to a hamlet outside Eymet in 2014.
“People really are very, very worried,” he said. “If the UK doesn’t get a deal, if it all goes up in smoke, we will be the losers. We already feel like bargaining chips. And whatever the politicians say, we have no clarity or certainty.”
Timmins and his wife sold up in Britain and invested all they had in France, but he said he had no idea what exactly they would have to do to stay. “Will we just have to fill in a form?” he asked. “Apply for a carte de séjour? Will there be some kind of minimum income requirement?”
A sign for a shop selling British goods.
Sean Smith for the Guardian
He was angry, too, that the couple’s plans to stay a few years in France and then go somewhere else in the EU, perhaps to Spain or Portugal, appeared stymied. “As things stand, Brits on the continent are going to be effectively landlocked,” he said. “Free to stay, but not to move on.”
Older Britons’ most serious concerns, Timmins said, were for the ever-falling value of their pensions (“people in their 70s are already taking pin-money jobs, gardening, cleaning, to top up their income”), and that the UK may one day no longer cover the healthcare costs of its pensioners abroad who paid British social security. “Private healthcare in France would leave some penniless,” he said.
Younger residents, many running thriving businesses, see fewer problems. “I’m registered, in the system, paying French tax and social security, an established business with plenty of work,” said Adrian Kewell, a self-employed electrician who came to work on one job in 2007 and never quite left. “I’m really happy here.”
At Eymet’s weekly market, a clutch of British stallholders were similarly unfazed. “It’s a bit ‘Brexit, what Brexit?’” said Karen Clinton, whose Secret Curry Club sells from half a dozen local markets. Andrea Lovesy and Carl Pope, who sell British food from porridge oats to pickle, said the fall in the exchange rate had not hurt them: “We’re taking in euros, buying in pounds.”
Newcomers said Brexit had not dented their dream of a new life in the sun of south-west France. David and Denise White, from Northamptonshire, who opened Rose’s Vintage Tearooms in Eymet less than a year ago, came close to calling their whole project off the morning after the referendum.
“But then someone said: ‘Just do it,’” said David, who had a tiling and plastering business. “And we did: bought in December 2016, moved in January, opened in May. We’ve been pretty much flat out ever since.”
Like many, Rupert Bache, who has been in France for nearly 30 years – running Le Pub Gambetta with his French wife, Mathilde, for almost 10 of them – said he had “not quite managed to get round” to applying for French citizenship as he had promised he would do if Britain voted leave.
Rupert Bache and his wife, Mathilde.
Sean Smith for the Guardian
“Me and paperwork don’t really get on,” he said. “But mainly, I keep dreaming something’s going to happen, that it won’t actually happen.”
Mathilde was fed up with the whole thing. “Society has far, far bigger problems than Brexit,” she said. “Here at least, it’s basically a problem of the rich. And meanwhile in Bergerac, there are people sleeping in their cars I really couldn’t care less about Brexit.”
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by Jon Henley
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There have always been quite a few Brits residing in France. The weather is better. And the food. And the wine. And the cultural events.... Other than that... I don't understand why...
I hadn't thought about Brexit and these expats.