Buying and running a French Holiday Business

Hi All

My wife has finally agreed to consider relocating to France in acouple of years to run a fishery. We have our own business which we are succession-planning for someone to run for us, which wil mean we can still take an income from that when we are out there. We should be in a position to buy something for cash when we do it.

I am an experienced angler but have no fishery management experience.

My thoughts are that maybe we will buy a property with a lake and some kind of guest accomodation. Perhaps a 3-4 acre lake with one chalet which we can let to groups as a whole for a week at a time.

Does anyone have an idea of how busy the market it and what sort of pitfalls I should consider. I know already that the Euro is strong, and I instinctively worry that cheap flights may become a thing of the past as the world becomes more environmentally aware, and fuel costs rise. I have also been told that the French fishery market is quite crowded and lots of people are failing.

Any comments/assistance would be gratefully received. This is an idea at the drawing board stage at the moment but is, of course, the dream of all anglers.

I would be very careful as the laws have recently changed in France. This has led many to sell up and head home or to other countries.

3-4 acres is a little small, I would suggest going bigger.

your clientelle would take time to build, however, there are some good agents in the uk who may be able to help this happen quicker.

do something different - there are hundreds of established french fisheries, what will be your unique selling point?

for a starter, a family friendly lake with decent accomodation, with decent sized fish, and close to local "attractions" (ievineyard!)would be nice

make sure you have enough money to live for three of 4 years without ANY income

make a huge effort to fit in, and br friendly with the local mayor - its definately not what you know and how much money, its who you invite to dinner.

and i agree with roto, 3-4 acres is too small - its got to be 10+ with (say)7 swims.

Millers is/are/were similar to what dave was suggesting and they have/or are selling up due to the owners ill health. superb waters all with good accomodation & well established with great fish.

Having lived in France for a couple of years I would echo what dave says about local politics and fitting in. There is nothing that irks the French more than people going to France and not fitting in by speaking french etc.

There are some great threads on Fishing Warehouse, where fishery owners discuss the pitfalls. Thanks guys.

Hello Blunderer,

I don't know anything about doing this kind of thing myself, but if it's any help I know that Gareth of Angling Lines runs a kind of blog thing and one of his recent subject was buying lakes in France..as you can imagine he knows what he's on about so it might be worth looking out for that one...

Also watch out on sky forNo Going Back, if you haven;t seen it already that is...the one about the bloke setting up his lake was well interesting..showed all the difficulties he went though and eveything from start to finish, it gets repeated now and then and is well worth watching.

Good luck, hope it works out for you /forum/smilies/smile_smiley.gif