Article: Spring Property Survey: Hunt is up for weekend retreats

WHEN the Channel Tunnel finally opens this year, the first passengers may find themselves greeted with hugs and kisses at Calais by several hundred excited people with strangely familiar accents.

The British have already arrived in northern France. In fact, they started swarming in more than five years ago, goggling at every tumbledown farmhouse with a scrawled a vendre sign nailed to the gate.

They were so cheap! And the tunnel was bound to push up prices, wasn't it?

For a few years UK buyers came by the boatload, wallets bursting from second-mortgages on their main homes. By the peak of the boom in 1989 they had invested around pounds 150m on French property, according to the Banque de ...

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