Sextant French Property Network www.sextantproperties.com

I was looking for a flat on the southern of France and found Sextant website.

They had lots of options on the area I wanted to buy and advised me the best spots to buy/avoid.

I've found a property that I liked and the paper work was done very quickly with their help and advice.

I'm now a happy owner of a property in France :)

I bought an investment property in three month ago with sextant/lecoindulmnp and I find the team very reactive and professional

I spoke with one of their sale consultants from their London's office and he helped me to book a visit in Limousin with a local English agent. I found a property during that visit and I can say he was available ans assisted me until the completion of the sale

Great work and I definitely recommend this bilingual company to anyone.

Apologies, a bit of a War and Peace review but it is our experience of dealing with Sextant and it was not an entirely positive process. We had two viewing appointments booked many weeks in advance with emails back and forth so no-one was in any doubt that these appointments were in the diary with all concerned (or so I presumed). We arrived for first appointment but the local agent didn't turn up. I rang her and she had us in the diary for two weeks later. Informed Sextant who said they couldn't understand why this had happened. Rearranged appointment and met agent the next day and she was absolutely charming and apologetic and we would actually have been happy to buy through her as she was lovely but the house was an overpriced dump (sorry, no other way to sugar coat it), something you couldn't tell from the flowery descriptions (“stunning house”) and carefully posed photos.....

Next house viewing a couple of days later had supposedly been reconfirmed by Sextant following our first experience and I had also already emailed the local agent a couple of days before anyway over another matter and referred to our appointment in that email. (I hadn't been told I had to confirm anything as Sextant were handling all details). This agent didn't even have the professionalism to acknowledge my email even though I was also enquiring about another property they had for sale.

We turned up for our appointment at the office to be met by a girl who refused to try to speak English even though I know she did speak it. I struggled on with my less than perfect French and worked out that she was saying, through her shrugging, that we were 'supposed to confirm the appointment yesterday'. Puzzled, and struggling with the vocabulary, I remembered I had Sextant's confirmation email on my iPad so showed her. Her face changed when she realised the appointment HAD been confirmed but she offered no apology and retained an attitude like you wouldn't believe - I was so annoyed by then that I forgot to mention the fact I had also emailed her myself two days previously!

Because we really wanted to see this house we bit our tongues and remained polite (how very English…!) and despite me actually having to ask whether we could still see the house as arranged when her demeanour implied we couldn’t, we got to the house, (having followed her at ridiculous speed through the countryside), to discover the owner didn't know we were coming until ten minutes before! He spent the first few minutes saying how he would have cleaned up if he'd had more notice that we were coming. I told him we'd had an appointment booked for at least 6 weeks so couldn't understand why there had been a problem.

As the owner was an English speaker it was easier to talk to him direct whilst we looked round the house rather than through this girl with the bad attitude, unhelpful demeanour and alleged lack of language skills. I don't think she approved of us speaking directly to him but frankly by then we didn't care. The upshot is we really liked the house and had it on our short list but decided not to make an offer because frankly we weren't prepared to deal with this awful agent and give a lot of commission to someone with such an attitude. By then of course having viewed we would have had to make the purchase through her so we walked away. You could argue we cut our nose off to spite our face but I’m sorry, if an agent can't be bothered then neither can we and there were plenty of other houses on the market with us viewing 12 more that week. I reported back to Sextant that day about the problems we'd had with this second local agent and they didn't even bother to reply to my email! They still haven't months later.

We have now bought a house through a locally based English agent who couldn't do enough to assist us - we complete next week and she's arranged a bank appointment (and will come along to translate just in case), sorted an appointment for a local electrician to meet us on site, will be assisting with setting up our utility accounts, amongst many other things. Nothing has been too much trouble for her. We are delighted we eventually found a house through her because she worked hard to earn her commission and acted as if she really valued our business, which I’m afraid to say I’ve seen little of from many French agents.

There is another property we are interested in viewing that's being sold through that same rude local agent and we now won’t do so and will be arranging to see it direct with the owners (we’ve since found out it’s owned by friends of a friend). Had her attitude been more helpful and less arrogant we would have been happy to arrange to view through her as we’re not people who try to avoid paying commission by circumventing the system but if they can’t even be bothered to answer your enquiring emails what are you supposed to do?!

I now realise Sextant are really an appointment-booking service and use local independent agencies and whilst we appreciate they can have little control over the attitude of those local agents, I did at least expect a response from Sextant to my feedback about the second appointment. They didn’t even follow up to see if we were interested in either house. Very disappointed but frankly, their loss.

Buying a house in France is difficult enough when you live in another country but the couldn’t-care-less attitude and obstructiveness really needs to change if local agents want to retain a share of their local market. It is not enough to provide a glossy web site with pretty pictures for people to coo over - let’s face it I’m sure that most will never go on to actually view, let alone buy a house, so gushing reviews about a website are hardly a comprehensive overview of that business in my opinion. Buyers who spend a lot of time and money on viewing trips (we’ve made 5 this year) expect the service to continue down to the viewings and beyond. After all when you’re asking someone to pay anything between say 6% - 12% for an introduction, they have a right to expect you to do some work for that money (and hey, perhaps even with a smile on your face...)

I purchased my 1st property in Dordogne with Sextant back in 2008 and the choice of properties on the website as well as the service is simply the best you'll ever get on that market. I just bought an investment property with them as they do specialise as well on this market and they simply offer ROI you'll never find anywhere else. Regarding the fact that they don't give exact location, that's simply a stupid comment as if they did, they would lose so many sales that they probably won't be there anymore!! Come on guys, keep up the good work!

James Appleby

sexton don't give out the location of there properies, which for overseas buyers is very difficult to check out the local area, distance from airports etc, they seem to have arrogant attitude, when it comes to answering questions about the properies too, i asked many questions about where the property was, and if they were open to offers,the answer that came back was "we don't give out the location and the asking price is the offer" as for any other details, nothing just the same advert that is on the internet, so a waste of time, with many British agents now doing well in france, i think this "paranoia" (as quoted by Natalie Avella in her book the french property buyers handbook page 124)will in the end see the end of companies like this.. sorry sexton, but you can't withdraw this as you have done on your own web site.

Sextant Properties website is definitely the best website to find a property in France as it's very easy to use and you've got a huge choice of properties.

Team very professional (French agents and no English !!!!) Free service! Only bad point, they don't work on Sundays. Overall, very good service, thank you for all you help guys!

They have plenty of properties in France and you can also see the price reductions, you can also add them to your favourites, ideal to prepare a viewing trip.

This website is user friendly and the navigation is very easy throughout the pages.