French-Property.com Find Listings

Purpose

Given a set of buyer characteristics (region, price range, bedroom count, property type, habitable / land size, free-text keywords, sort order), return the matching for-sale property listings on french-property.com — each with title, reference, price (EUR), region/department/commune, bedrooms/bathrooms, habitable + land sizes, listing URL, image URL, and description snippet. Read-only; never enquires, saves, or contacts vendors.

When to Use

• Buyer agent searching for French real estate within a budget, region, and structural criteria.
• Monitoring new listings matching a saved profile (re-fetch + diff on reference).
• Bulk enumeration across regions, departments, or feature flags (e.g. swimming pool, outbuildings) — sale side of the site.
• Anywhere you'd otherwise scrape french-property.com search HTML — the URL-param surface is faster than UI-driving, and the rendered HTML already carries Schema.org microdata.

Workflow

The french-property.com search page at /properties-for-sale is a fully server-rendered Laravel app behind Cloudflare that accepts every filter as a URL query parameter. No login, no JS execution, no anti-bot challenge with a residential proxy — browse cloud fetch <url> --proxies returns the same HTML the browser renders, with all listing data inlined as Schema.org microdata. There is no public JSON API. Lead with URL-param + HTML extraction; the browser path is only useful for visual verification.

1. Construct the search URL by appending filters to https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale:

   Param	Type	Notes
   regions	English-kebab slug, single value	Valid: alsace, aquitaine, auvergne, brittany, centre-val-de-loire, champagne-ardenne, corsica, franche-comte, languedoc-roussillon, limousin, lorraine, midi-pyrenees, nord-pas-de-calais, normandy, occitanie, paris-ile-de-france, pays-de-la-loire, picardy, poitou-charentes, provence-alpes-cote-d-azur, rhone-alpes. ⚠ See gotchas — French slugs silently no-op.
   minimum_price, maximum_price	int (EUR)	e.g. 200000
   minimum_bedrooms, maximum_bedrooms	int
   minimum_floor_size, maximum_floor_size	int (m²)	Habitable size, not land
   minimum_land_size, maximum_land_size	int	Pair with land_size_unit=m (m²) or land_size_unit=ha (hectares)
   property_types_all	single value	house | apartment | business | land. Despite the trailing _all, this is NOT an array; the form only emits one value.
   keywords_all	URL-encoded text	Listings must contain ALL keywords. Spaces as + or %20.
   keywords_any	URL-encoded text	Listings matching ANY keyword.
   reference	string	Direct lookup by reference code (e.g. IFPC46841); returns Results 1 - 1 of 1.
   exclude_agencies	1	Private-vendor listings only (typically ~2% of inventory).
   sort_by	enum	date (default, most recent), price, land_size.
   sort_direction	enum	asc, desc.
   start_page	int ≥ 1	Pagination cursor. 25 results per page. Page 1 omits the param or uses start_page=1.
   currency	enum	EUR (default), GBP, USD, CAD, AUD. Affects on-page display only — <meta itemprop="price"> is always in the underlying currency (typically EUR).

   Example for "Houses in Brittany, €200K–€400K, 3+ bedrooms, sorted by most recent":

   https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?regions=brittany&minimum_price=200000&maximum_price=400000&minimum_bedrooms=3&property_types_all=house&sort_by=date&sort_direction=desc
   

2. Fetch the page through a residential proxy (the site is Cloudflare-fronted; bare requests sometimes get challenged but proxy fetches consistently return 200):

   browse cloud fetch "$url" --proxies
   

   Response envelope contains the rendered HTML under .content. No --verified / advanced-stealth needed — the search route does not run an Akamai/Datadome-class challenge in 2026-05 testing.

3. Read the total count from the rendered text — single regex hit:

   /Results (\d+) - (\d+) of (\d+)/
   

   The third capture group is the total match count across all pages. Total pages = ceil(total / 25).

4. Detect the no-results case before trying to parse listings: the page renders the literal string No properties found - try expanding your search: followed by a property-alert sign-up form. Emit total_matches: 0, listings: [] in that branch — don't error.

5. Extract each listing. Split the HTML on <li class="property_listing standard "> (note the double-space — that's the production class string, see gotchas). Within each block, the data is all in inline Schema.org microdata, no JS required:

   Field	Selector / regex
   url (relative)	<meta itemprop="url" content="(/sale-property/\d+-[A-Z0-9]+)"/> → prefix with https://www.french-property.com
   reference	<span itemprop="productID">Ref: ([A-Z0-9]+)</span>
   title	first <h3 itemprop="name">…<a [^>]*>([^<]+)</a></h3> (often truncated with …; for the full title, GET the detail page)
   price_eur	<meta itemprop="price" content="(\d+)"/> (string of digits, parse to int; 0 or missing = "Price on request")
   currency	<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="([A-Z]{3})"/> (almost always EUR)
   region	<span class="region">Region: <strong>([^<]+)</strong>
   department	<span class="department">Department: <strong>([^<]+)</strong> — e.g. Ille-et-Vilaine (35)
   commune	<span class="commune">\s*Location:\s*<strong>([^<]+)</strong> — e.g. Rennes, 35000
   bedrooms	class="info-beds">.*?<strong>\s*(\d+)
   bathrooms	class="info-bath">.*?<strong>(\d+) (may be absent for studios / land)
   habitable_size_m2	class="info-habitable">.*?<strong>.*?(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\s*m² (may be absent for land)
   land_size	class="info-land">.*?<strong>.*?(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\s*(ha|m²) — value + unit
   image_url	first <meta itemprop="contentUrl" content="([^"]+\?height=500&amp;width=750)"/> within the listing block (full-resolution)
   description	<div class="description" itemprop="description">\s*<p>([\s\S]*?)</p> — strip whitespace, decode HTML entities

6. Paginate if more pages exist (total > 25): re-issue the same URL with &start_page=2, &start_page=3, … up to ceil(total/25). The page title gets a - page N suffix you can use as a sanity check. Sustained throughput at 1 req/s through one proxy IP has been smooth in testing.

7. Sanity-check region scope before emitting. After parsing, every listing's region field should equal the requested region's display name (e.g. regions=brittany → Brittany; regions=provence-alpes-cote-d-azur → Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur). If you see mixed regions, the slug was wrong and the site fell back to all-France — see gotchas.

Browser fallback

Only needed if the URL-param + HTML extraction path is somehow blocked (not observed in testing). Drive a session in the standard way:

sid=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --proxies | node -pe \
  "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
browse open "$url" --remote --session "$sid"
browse get html body --remote --session "$sid" > page.html      # same HTML the fetch path returns
browse screenshot --remote --session "$sid" --path screenshot.png
browse cloud sessions update "$sid" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

browse snapshot is not useful here — the listings render server-side, but the accessibility-tree refs add no information beyond the microdata you already have in HTML. Skip the snapshot step.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• regions= requires the ENGLISH kebab-case slug, NOT the French slug used in /regions/<slug>/ URLs. Verified failures (silent no-op, falls back to all-France with title "Property for sale in France"): bretagne, bourgogne, provence_alpes_cote_dazur, haute_normandie, basse_normandie, paris, ile-de-france, loire-valley. Verified successes: the 21 English slugs listed in the workflow table. The trap is silent: the URL still loads 200 OK with no error indicator — only the <title> and per-listing region strings reveal that no region filter was applied. Always verify by checking the response <title> contains the expected English region name before trusting the result set.
• provence-alpes-cote-d-azur uses d-azur with a hyphen, not dazur or d%27azur. Both alternatives fall back to all-France. Confirmed working slug: provence-alpes-cote-d-azur.
• departments=NN does NOT filter via URL params in 2026-05 testing. Adding departments=35 (Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany) to a regions=brittany query returns the identical 333 results as regions=brittany alone. Bracket-syntax departments[]=35 returns a 500 "Sorry, we are having temporary issues with our system" error page. The departments multi-select on the search form is driven by client-side JS that mutates a hidden field and submits a different payload shape — the URL-param surface only honors regions=, not departments=. To scope below region, post-filter the extracted department field client-side (it's always present as <span class="department">…<strong>NAME (NN)</strong>).
• property_types_all is single-value despite the _all suffix. The form's <select> emits one house|apartment|business|land. Passing multiple values (property_types_all=house,apartment or property_types_all[]=house&property_types_all[]=apartment) is silently dropped — the response shows all types. To search across types, fetch each type separately and union client-side.
• The CSS class string is property_listing standard with a double space and trailing space. That's the production literal in the rendered HTML. If you use a CSS selector framework, match by class containment (property_listing standard), not exact string equality. The four observed listing variants are property_listing featured , property_listing standard , property_listing advertise, property_listing standard text-center. The first two are real listings; advertise is a sponsored card with NO microdata (no meta itemprop="price", no reference) — skip it. standard text-center is an empty-state placeholder shown when a page has fewer than 25 results — also skip it.
• Titles in the listing card are truncated with … (e.g. Just a Few Minutes from Rennes, in a Preserved and Perfectly Peaceful Setting, this Elegant Character Property Exudes Ch…). For the full title, fetch the detail page at the meta itemprop="url" link. The truncation length appears to be ~155 characters.
• bathrooms, habitable_size_m2, land_size are optional fields — apartments often lack land_size; studios may lack bathrooms; land plots lack both bedrooms and habitable_size_m2. Always guard the regex with a presence check; don't emit null as 0.
• info-land carries the unit inline (2.6 ha, 1200 m²). Don't assume hectares. Parse both number and unit; convert client-side if you need a normalized field. The land filter's land_size_unit URL param accepts m or ha; mismatched units (e.g. minimum_land_size=1 with land_size_unit=m) return effectively-all results, so always pair them.
• page_size URL param is silently ignored. The form has name="page_size" and 25 is fixed. Don't try to fetch 100 per page.
• <meta itemprop="price"> is the source of truth, not the <h4>€780,000</h4> rendered text. The displayed h4 changes with currency=GBP|USD|...; the meta always emits the underlying EUR integer. Some listings have price=0 or omit the meta entirely — those render as "Price on request" / blank — emit price_eur: null for these, not 0.
• Featured listings appear on EVERY page of paginated results (paid placement). They have the same reference/url, so deduplicate by reference when collecting across pages, or you'll over-count.
• Results A - B of C regex match can find multiple hits if the page has alternate-language <link hreflang> versions in the head with translated text. Use the FIRST match or scope the regex to the <div id="results"> container.
• Cloudflare Cache-Status is DYNAMIC, never HIT. Search responses are not cached at the edge — count on ~1–3s per page-fetch through proxy. There is no rate-limit response observed at 1 req/s sustained, but adding any explicit rate-limit avoids social risk.
• exclude_agencies=1 only narrows by ~2% (333 → 326 in Brittany 2026-05 sample) — most listings are agency-listed. Use it only when private-vendor-only is a hard requirement.
• The sort URL param does NOT work; you need the split sort_by + sort_direction pair. The form's <select name="sort"> emits the full /properties-for-sale?sort_by=…&sort_direction=… URL as its value, which is what gets navigated to. Passing sort=date alone is silently ignored.
• Rentals are a different surface. /properties-for-sale is sale-only. For rentals, the endpoint is /properties-to-rent with a POST-only form (/properties-to-rent/submit-search) and a completely different param namespace (price_min / price_max / bedrooms_min / bedrooms_max / locations[] / attributes[]). This skill targets sale listings; rentals require a separate skill.
• burgundy (English-kebab) appears to NOT be a valid regions= slug — testing returned an empty title repeatedly. The corresponding metropolitan region (Bourgogne) was merged into Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in 2016, but neither burgundy nor bourgogne-franche-comte works. If a user requests Burgundy, either search the underlying Côte-d'Or / Saône-et-Loire / Nièvre / Yonne departments by regions=france with client-side department filtering, OR fall back to the directory at /regions/bourgogne/ (which links to listings via per-department deep URLs).

Expected Output

{
  "success": true,
  "search_params": {
    "regions": "brittany",
    "minimum_price": 200000,
    "maximum_price": 400000,
    "minimum_bedrooms": 3,
    "property_types_all": "house",
    "sort_by": "date",
    "sort_direction": "desc"
  },
  "url": "https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?regions=brittany&minimum_price=200000&maximum_price=400000&minimum_bedrooms=3&property_types_all=house&sort_by=date&sort_direction=desc",
  "total_matches": 61,
  "page": 1,
  "page_size": 25,
  "total_pages": 3,
  "listings": [
    {
      "reference": "IFPC46841",
      "url": "https://www.french-property.com/sale-property/1-IFPC46841",
      "title": "Just a Few Minutes from Rennes, in a Preserved and Perfectly Peaceful Setting, this Elegant Character Property Exudes Ch…",
      "price_eur": 780000,
      "currency": "EUR",
      "region": "Brittany",
      "department": "Ille-et-Vilaine (35)",
      "commune": "Rennes, 35000",
      "bedrooms": 5,
      "bathrooms": 3,
      "habitable_size_m2": 260,
      "land_size_value": 2.6,
      "land_size_unit": "ha",
      "image_url": "https://cdn4.french-property.com/private-vendors/IFPC46841/21285379-6923-4488-8aa3-b07b385bd621.jpg?height=500&width=750",
      "description": "5 bed country estate for sale in Rennes. Renovated property with swimming pool – 260 m² – 2.5 hectares – 10 min from Rennes on the Rennes/St Malo road…"
    }
  ]
}

No-results shape

{
  "success": true,
  "search_params": { "regions": "brittany", "minimum_price": 50000000 },
  "url": "https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?regions=brittany&minimum_price=50000000",
  "total_matches": 0,
  "page": 1,
  "total_pages": 0,
  "listings": [],
  "no_results_message": "No properties found - try expanding your search:"
}

Single-reference lookup shape

{
  "success": true,
  "search_params": { "reference": "IFPC46841" },
  "url": "https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?reference=IFPC46841",
  "total_matches": 1,
  "page": 1,
  "total_pages": 1,
  "listings": [ { "reference": "IFPC46841", "...": "..." } ]
}

Invalid-region fallback (defensive)

If the response <title> contains "Property for sale in France" but the request specified regions=<X>, the slug was invalid and the site silently fell back to all-France. Emit:

{
  "success": false,
  "reason": "invalid_region_slug",
  "requested_region": "bretagne",
  "hint": "Use the English kebab-case slug. Valid: alsace, aquitaine, ... See SKILL.md workflow table.",
  "search_params": { "regions": "bretagne" }
}