Among the photographs of artists, writers, decorators, politicians, and tycoons is a picture of a man who, as the caption says, knows all the houses in the area and who accepts three dinner invitations at the same time. The reader may think that this is merely the result of a deprived childhood or an insatiable craving for gigot en croûte, but it is nothing of the kind. Our man is working. He is a real estate agent. He needs to know who’s looking, who’s buying, and who’s selling, and there just aren’t enough dinners in the normal day to keep him au courant.
It’s a hectic business being a real estate agent in the Lubéron, particularly now that the area is passing through a fashionable phase. Property prices have inflated like a three-dinner stomach, and even during our short time as residents we have seen increases that defy reason or belief. A pleasant old ruin with half a roof and a few acres of land was offered to some friends for three million francs. Other friends decided to build instead of converting, and were in shock for a week at the estimate: five million francs. A house with possibilities in one of the favored villages? One million francs.
Naturally, the agent’s fees are geared to these zero-encrusted prices, although the exact percentage varies. We have heard of commissions ranging from 3 to 8 percent, sometimes paid by the seller, sometimes by the buyer.
It can add up to a very comfortable living. And, to the outsider, it may appear to be a congenial way to earn that living; it’s always interesting to look at houses, and often the buyers and sellers are interesting as well (not always honest or reliable, as we shall see, but seldom dull). As a métier, being a real estate agent in a desirable part of the world theoretically offers a stimulating and lucrative way to pass the time in between dinners.
It is not, alas, without its problems, and the first of these is competition. Nearly six yellow pages in the Vaucluse telephone directory are taken up by real estate agents and their advertisements—properties of style, properties of character, exclusive properties, quality properties, hand-picked properties, properties of guaranteed charm—the house hunter is spoiled for choice and baffled by the terminology. What is the difference between character and style? Should one go for something exclusive or something hand-picked? The only way to find out is to take your dreams and your budget along to an agent and spend a morning, a day, a week among the bastides, the mas, the maisons de charme, and the white elephants that are currently on offer.
Finding an agent in the Lubéron is no more difficult than finding a butcher. In the old days, the village notaire used to be the man who knew if Mère Bertrand was selling off her old farm, or if a recent death had made a house empty and available. To a large extent, the notaire’s function as a property scout has been taken over by the agent, and almost every village has one. Ménerbes has two. Bonnieux has three. The more fashionable Gordes had, at the last count, four. (It was in Gordes that we saw competition in the raw. One agent was distributing flyers to all the cars parked in the Place du Château. He was followed at a discreet distance by a second agent who was taking the flyers off the windscreens and replacing them with his own. Unfortunately, we had to leave before seeing if the third and fourth agents were lurking behind a buttress waiting for their turn.)
Without exception, these agents are initially charming and helpful, and they have dossiers filled with photographs of ravishing properties, some of them actually priced at less than seven figures. These, inevitably, are the ones that have just been sold, but there are others—mills, nunneries, shepherd’s hovels, grandiose maisons de maître, turreted follies, and farmhouses of every shape and size. What a selection! And this is only one agent.
But if you should go to see a second agent, or a third, you may experience a definite feeling of déjà vu. There is something familiar about many of the properties. The photographs have been taken from different angles, but there’s no doubt about it. These are the same mills and nunneries and farmhouses that you saw in the previous dossier. And there you have the second problem that bedevils the life of a Lubéron agent: There are not enough properties to go round.
Building restrictions in most parts of the Lubéron are fairly stringent, and they are more or less observed by everyone except farmers, who seem to be able to build at will: And so the supply of what agents would call properties with beaucoup d’allure is limited. This situation brings out the hunting instinct, and many agents during the less busy winter months will spend days driving around, eyes and ears open for signs or rumor that an undiscovered jewel may shortly be coming on the market. If it is, and if the agent is quick and persuasive enough, there is the chance of an exclusive arrangement and full commission. What usually happens, though, is that a seller will retain two or three agents and leave them to sort out the delicate matter of how the fees should be split.