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From The Sunday Times

March 18, 2007

French without tears

A flat on the Côte d’Azur provides a hassle-free holiday home, discovers Sian Griffiths

It took Sue Phillips just one leisurely lunch “with lots of rosé” to decide on buying a holiday home on the Côte d’Azur. “I flew out to Nice on Thursday evening and met the agents for coffee on Friday morning,” says Phillips, 50, who is London bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, the Arab-owned television station. “I saw one flat that had just come on the market, and then they made me look at several others. We had lunch and I made an offer on the first one I had seen in the afternoon. The agents said it was the fastest sale they had ever done: within two months it was mine. I’ve taken longer to choose a dress.”

Traditionally, most Britons looking to buy in France would be drawn to picturesque old villas, farmhouses or chateaux despite, or often because of their need for renovation. Phillips, by contrast, is part of a new wave of British second-home seekers plumping for flats — often new-builds — that they can lock up and leave without having to deal with grumpy builders, or worry about who will look after the garden when they go back to Blighty.

With plenty of daily flights to Nice in the summer from the UK and prices on low-cost airlines such as EasyJet as low as £30 one way, the south of France is easy to access. It can also be a good investment; prices there have been rising at an annual 10% in the past three years and are still going up, says Andy Hawkins, senior international property consultant for Chesterton estate agency. Phillips bought her four-bedroom flat in Nice’s old town 18 months ago for £280,000. Since then, she says, it has appreciated by more than £60,000. She expects it to rise even more when a programme of pedestrianising and sprucing up Nice with piazzas and fountains is completed later this year.

“It’s boom time here,” she says. “The great thing about the flat is that you shut the shutters and the door and don’t think about it until next time.”

Phillips, who used to own a farmhouse near Perpignan in southwest France, says her two (then) teenagers were one of the reasons she switched to a flat in town. “They didn’t want to be hanging around in the countryside, they wanted something hip with action, and that’s what Nice, the fifth largest city in France, provides.”

There are rental opportunities, too. Phillips uses her flat once a month, flying out for a leisurely weekend. She has plans to rent it out via a website she has designed and thinks she can get £1,000 a week in the height of summer.

Across the Côte d’Azur, from Nice to Cannes, new developments are springing up; studios start for as little as £110,000. There are the same opportunities to spot celebrities or rub shoulders with the beau monde as elsewhere on the Riviera, but you can do so from a base that is increasingly urban and flat-led.

“Once, we sold one villa for every apartment; now it’s more like 10 flats to one villa,” says Dennis Broadfield, a former journalist who runs TotallyRiviera.com, a property-finding company. “There is a trend among Brits now for buying new-build on the Côte d’Azur and especially new flats.

“Renovation is more difficult than it was, costs run over,” he says. “For a lot of people, new-build is now seen as the way of having a holiday home in the south of France. You can lock it up and leave it for six months and not worry about coming back to leaky pipes and a flooded kitchen.”

Some 30 minutes’ drive along the coast from Nice is Monaco, a tax haven for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. You may not have a hope of affording a broom closet in the tiny principality, but at the little French hillside town of Beausoleil, on the border, you can buy a studio flat overlooking the port of Monte Carlo from about £210,000.

That’s exactly what Julie Whittaker, 49, who works in commercial property in Manchester, has done. The two-bedroom flat she bought recently off-plan in the Villa Montebello development there cost £320,000. Getting to her holiday home couldn’t be much quicker: it is 25 minutes on the train from Nice to Monaco, and then a 10-minute walk up the hill to her apartment block. If you want a really speedy transit, then there is the option of transfer by helicopter from the airport.

Beausoleil lacks the tax advantages of Monaco, of course, but these properties are a fraction of the price they would cost in the principality.

“I am definitely part of a trend,” confirms Whittaker. “English people used to buy old places in France and then live to regret it. I just wanted a new place with no headaches.” Because of its location, her flat is at the higher end of the price scale for new-build flats along the coast. But if you are just starting out in the second-home market and want to get a foothold in the south of France, Chesterton is marketing homes in the centre of Cagnes-sur-Mer, a 15-minute drive from Nice. There, developers Kaufman & Broad are building 84 flats costing from £135,000 for a studio to £300,000 for a three-bedroom flat. At Villeneuve-Loubet, a coastal town between Cannes and Nice, the same developers are building a U-shaped block of 64 flats, also for sale through Chesterton, from £150,000 to £1.2m.

Some of the developers of the new-build schemes offer rental deals, often as part of the popular French government-backed leaseback scheme. Under its terms, owners lease back their properties, normally for a minimum of nine years, to the developer and receive a guaranteed return, which will vary according to the amount of personal usage. As a further sweetener, the state also pays them back the Vat.

Whittaker, for one, needs no convincing. “I didn’t want a damp Provencal mas [farmhouse] that I could have bought for the same price,” she says. “I wanted a new property where I didn’t have to deal with builders or worry about leaving it. I wanted a holiday home, in other words.”

Chesterton, 020 7201 2070, www.chesterton.co.uk; TotallyRiviera, 00 33 493 134 420, www.totallyriviera.com