The Australian couple who are selling their share of French holiday home

When couple Patricia and Norman Farrell started spending all of their holidays in France, they realised it would just be easier to buy a home there.

That’s when they posted an ad in the local paper looking for others who would want to co-own a home with them. It was a surprisingly easy sell.

“We loved the idea of having a permanent base but felt we couldn’t justify the cost of owning a holiday cottage outright,” Sydneysider Mrs Farrell said. At the time, she and her husband were also both working full-time, which meant they could only spend a few weeks a year there.

It’s been 12 years since the now-retired journalist and Coca-Cola executive set up a property co-operative in their favourite wine-making region of France with five other Francophile couples from Australia.

Through the French holding company they set up, each couple bought a $60,000 share in a medieval-era house in Puissalicon, a town in the Mediterranean region of Languedoc Roussillon. 

They have a rotating roster that ensures each couple spends roughly two months a year in the modest property, which is located 756 kilometres south of Paris. 

Mrs Farrell said the co-ownership of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house has been a “roaring success” as the shareholders have happily made it work together for more than a decade.

“We have become good friends actually because we all have a shared loved for the house and the village,” Mrs Farrell said.

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Over the past 12 years, Mrs Farrell estimated they have spent a month a year in the house, inviting friends and family to stay and said it was one of best things they’ve done.

They’re now selling their share for $75,000 to relocate to Yorkshire in England where they have a growing number of grandchildren.

“It’s probably not much more than the price of an on-site caravan and you have a beautiful character-filled medieval cottage in a gorgeous wine-village. It’s just incredible,” Mrs Farrell said.

The trend of Australians purchasing properties overseas has gained traction in recent years and new services are sprung up to help people invest and find properties in different countries.

Jeremy Kasler, CEO of CityYield a service that specialises in international investment properties, said more people were considering investing in property overseas thanks to technology and rising prices domestically.

“There’s so many levels of property prices all over the world and in this day and age with travel getting cheaper and the world getting smaller, why shouldn’t people in Sydney take advantage of it,” Mr Kasler said.

“The world has gotten smaller with technology with the ability to view five apartments in one afternoon in London, Germany, Spain all round the world, which you couldn’t do before but the other thing which is very, very relevant to Australians is financing,” Mr Kasler said.

But he warned potential buyers to “tread with care” when co-purchasing a home because additional owners could create extra problems. He also encouraged buyers to do their due diligence on potential co-owners.

He said a shared holiday home purchase definitely needed to be funded with extra money or your “caravan money budget” and not your life savings.

Owning a portion of a home is a concept that’s on the rise in Australia with several platforms like BrickX having launched in the past few years. 

Meanwhile holiday home timeshares have been commonplace in the US and Europe for many years.