“We first heard about Flat Hunter through an article in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper about an Australian couple who had used your services to buy several investment flats in Paris.
Although we were familiar with Paris having lived there for 4 years, we knew that it would be virtually impossible to find and buy an apartment in Paris during one of our short trips over there without some serious assistance. Flat Hunter offered a service which was exactly what we were looking for - from chasing up real estate agents in order to set up viewing appointments to providing recommendations for a notaire, a French mortgage broker and even a builder whom we used to refurbish the property.
We were assigned our own personal Flat Hunter consultant, Olanda de Rooy very early on in the process who began corresponding with us by email to find out and understand exactly what type of apartment we were looking for and in which areas, advising us on what to expect in which areas for our budget and sending through images and details of similar apartments so that she could fully understand our brief. I arranged a trip lasting 2 weeks, during which Olanda had set up in advance viewings everyday with appropriate apartments which were on the market - also using her relationships with real estate agents to show me properties which had not yet reached the open market. In between appointments we would sit down and review the pros and cons of each of the properties, refining the brief even more before Olanda would return to her search to check for any other additional properties which may have come on to the market that day.
During that 2 week search period, Olanda worked exclusively and exhaustively on our particular search and I am very happy to say that she found us a great apartment on my very last day in Paris. Through one of Olanda’s contacts ,it was an apartment which hadn’t yet come back on to the market after another buyer had been unable to complete so I knew we had to decide quickly in order to secure the purchase. Although I was leaving the next day, I was able to sign over a power of attorney to Olanda and the notaire who could deal with the legal work on our behalf, making the whole process run smoothly even though we were based on the other side of the world with an 11 hour time difference! On completion, Olanda was able to meet with the previous owners to pick up the keys on our behalf, transfer the utilities into our names and in addition organise for the builder to go round to give an estimate on the refurbishment work we wanted to do.
In summary, without the services of Flat Hunter we believe it would have been impossible to find so efficiently and quickly such an apartment in the area of our choice - Flat Hunter took away all of the frustration of searching and the setting up of the viewings, and helped to avoid any potential communication problems and misunderstandings in terms of the language. Through them, the buying process couldn’t have run any more smoothly and we really valued the way they oversaw the process - right through to the final signing and even beyond to the beginning of the refurbishment stage.
We would strongly recommend Flat Hunters services to any potential buyer as the easiest way to buy a property in Paris.”
