This month we celebrate the 7th anniversary of our Newsletter, with now over 25,000 registered readers.

In the first issue of our Newsletter in November 2006 we lead with the headline that it was a ‘buyer’s market’ in France.

Reading a similar article in this month’s issue you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed!

Of course, in the intervening period quite a lot has happened, not least the fact that we have entered a more uncertain and less prosperous age.

No doubt because of that the stampede to buy property in France that occurred during the first five years of the last decade as turned into a crawl.

However, the evidence of our own research indicates that many more who now buy in France do so with greater composer and conviction, with a clearer plot as to their prospective foreign adventure.

That new climate of realism is due in no small part to the growth of the internet and the sheer quantity of information that is now available about buying property and living in France.

We hope that over the past seven years we have made a useful contribution to that new athenaeum of information.

Our philosophy has been a very clear one: to focus on providing useful, practical information about French property ownership and living in France.

So the editorial policy we have adopted is to tell the good, the bad and even occasionally the downright ugly.

Make no mistake, this writer considers France to be one of the most desirable expatriate destinations on earth, offering a great quality of life and exhibiting fewer of the disconcerting 'extremes' that may be encountered by expatriate life elsewhere on the planet, whether of distance, climate, property market or of lifestyle.

However, unless the romanticism of owning a French idyll is balanced by a more pragmatist motif it will not be credible on the page, or sustainable in reality.

Perhaps as a result, our pages have won a reputation as one of the most authoritative and objective sources of information and advice about buying French property and living in France. We know that, because that is what you tell us.

That is also maybe why over the past seven years the readership of our Newsletter has grown seven-fold, from a modest 3,700 registrations at the end of 2006, to nearly 26,000 this month.

These figures exclude the many tens of thousands who also find us on the web via their search engine. This year there have been over 1.6 million views of our news and information pages.

Although it was never our intention to be a ‘breaking news’ service, we are proud of the many important investigative reports we have published, notably on health cover and social charges, both of which are ongoing, not infrequently making very good headlines for others to use.

Our news coverage of the property market in France and the legal and practical aspects of French property ownership is unrivalled anywhere else on-line or in print.

We also give strong coverage to starting and running a business in France, as we recognise that, either out of choice or necessity, increasing numbers of you now work in France.

Although most of our original readers came from outside of France, now nearly 40% are residents of France. We have every intention of continuing to develop a broadly based Anglophone readership, from both within and outside of the borders of France.

In the coming years we shall continue to develop the quality and range of our Newsletter and Guides to France pages, in partnership with other specialist writers and partners. The additional costs of that growth may result in some of the information only being available on a paid subscription basis, but we will endeavour to ensure that as much as possible remains accessible merely by the click of a button.

David Yeates, Editor
Gascony, France