Portals ask for your criteria. Nobody asks why you are buying.

Every property portal asks the same questions. Where, how much, how big, how many rooms. None of them asks the one that decides everything.

Two buyers, the same boxes, opposite houses

Take two people filling in the form identically. House, 250,000 euros, four rooms, in Brittany. A search engine treats them as one buyer and sends them the same listings.

The first wants to live there and let an outbuilding as a holiday rental. So they need an annexe, parking, walking distance to a station, neighbours who tolerate comings and goings, and rules that permit short lets.

The second is retiring and wants quiet. They need everything on one floor, no renovation, a doctor nearby, and no passing traffic at all.

Identical criteria, opposite requirements. The perfect house for one is disqualified on sight for the other, and no filter will ever say so.

What a form cannot hold

This is not laziness on the portals' part. It is a limit of the format.

A filter only works on things that can be enumerated. You can list property types, price bands, room counts. You cannot list reasons for buying, because they are endless and they come out as sentences, not tick boxes.

Some sites added a free text field. It sits empty on most searches, and nobody searches against it anyway: a keyword engine does not know that "outbuilding to convert" and "convertible garage" describe the same wish.

Why this gap costs more if you are buying from abroad

A local buyer can absorb a bad match. They drive over on a Saturday, spend twenty minutes, and cross it off.

If you are buying French property from another country, the same mismatch costs a flight and a weekend. And your intention is usually further from the standard case: a second home, a gîte, a rental investment, a place to retire to in ten years. Those intentions carry requirements that no French search form has a box for, and they are precisely the ones that decide whether a property works for you.

The information existed all along. It was in your head the day you started looking, and nobody asked for it.

Asking why

There is nothing complicated about capturing an intention. You let someone write it in their own words, then you understand it.

"A house with an outbuilding to convert, not too far from a station, to live in and host guests" is not a set of filters. It is a sentence, and it carries more usable information than twelve ticked boxes: it says what is essential, what is negotiable, and what rules a property out on the spot.

It also changes what can be said to an owner. Not "buyers are searching in your price range", but "someone is looking for exactly what you are selling, and here is why".

Describing an intention takes two minutes and needs no form. What was missing was never the buyers' willingness. It was somewhere to say it.

Le Tour du Proprio collects property searches in plain language. Describe yours.