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BEZIERS? BRING IT ON!
South of France's 'boom-town' set for Brit house hunting frenzy with launch of new low-cost flights
Down in the south of France, on the Mediterranean coast, the Languedoc-Roussillon region is already something of a hot spot for UK holiday home hunters. According to local newspaper La Gazette, 10 per cent of all holiday homes here are owned by Brits, and from March 31, the region will be welcoming yet more Brits with the launch of Ryanair flights from Bristol to the Languedoc airport of Béziers.
The new route brings the number of Languedoc airports with direct UK connections to five: Béziers, Carcassonne, Perpignan, Nîmes, and regional capital Montpellier.
The 'no-frills' airline will be running three flights a week from Bristol to Béziers -Cap d'Agde airport, situated in the Hérault departmnt, and the area's tourist body is expecting a huge influx of anglophone visitors; consequently, they are offering training courses in English, fine food and wine for local tourist trade businesses.
Said Alex Charles of Languedoc holiday home sales and rental specialist Crème de Languedoc (creme-de-languedoc.com): "The new Béziers-Bristol connection is an exciting development. Although we already have direct flights from the UK into four Languedoc airports, Béziers is strategically important because it fills the large gap between Montpellier to the east, and Carcassonne to the west.'
Charles continues: Béziers has invested huge amounts already in its infrastructure, improving and developing the town centre, its outlying areas and access routes, and its ambitious programme for continued growth and improvement makes it a hot tip for investors, or anyone looking to buy a holiday home in a truly up-and-coming destination in the south of France. If you check the FNAIM (French national estate agents federation) latest official figures, you'll see that the town has one of the best rental yield figures for the whole region ' a healthy 5.6 per cent, beating its rivals in Montpellier, Perpignan, Nîmes and Sète.
Formerly somewhat run-down, Béziers now boasts a host of smart wine bars and restaurants, including La Compagnie des Comptoirs, run by Michelin-starred chefs Jacques and Laurent Pourcel. For culture buffs, the town has a theatre company run by a national French icon (renowned theatre producer/director Jérome Savary left Paris after twenty years to set up a new base with his company at Béziers' Théatre des Franciscains in 2007), while the autumn 2008 opening of a brand new multimedia public library designed by leading Paris architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte is eagerly awaited.
For more down-to-earth pastimes, the quartier Wilson near Béziers station is a huge building site that will shortly house a ten-screen multiplex cinema, an open-air shopping centre, a leisure centre with a fourteen-lane bowling alley, a hotel, 10,000 square metres of offices, and a complex of self-catering units for short-term rental.
Character apartments in Béziers city centre are a steal compared to UK prices. Alex Charles comments: 'British buyers really go for period apartments with parquet floors, marble mantelpieces and high ceilings, and there are some prime examples of this type of property in the 18th and 19th century buildings in the centre of Béziers. For this kind of home in good decorative order, with two bedrooms, in the very heart of town, you?d be looking at a budget of around 155,000 - 200,000 euros.'
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