[quote=AN]I don’t know all the areas in France, but looking the maps for those houses, they look like they’re out in the country side. I was expecting Paris or something similar at Inland Empire pricing. How much is property tax in France?

Maui’s beaches are nice, but hardly what I’d call the best beaches in the world. I’d rate Bora Bora, Moorea, Tahiti, Fiji, Maldives, etc heads and shoulders above Maui.[/quote]

Central Paris is very expensive. The suburbs just outside less so. A nice homes in somewhere like Compiegne is about $700-$800k. You need to remember that Europe is not laid out like the US. Rural France is France. There are something like 36,000 villages alone, and that excludes hamlets towns and cities, that crisscross forming a giant network over a largely arable land. So living in rural France is not like living in rural US. You do not need to live in Paris to enjoy a good life style. Southern California doesn’t really have cities, at least in a European sense. It is for the most part a suburban sprawl, so population density are what drive central Paris prices, as well as the sheer beauty of the place of course.

There are two equivalent property taxes in France, but they are small in comparison.

I guess beaches are in the eye of the beholder, and yes places like the Caribbean, Seychelles, other Polynesian islands, spring to mind, but I was really comparing Hawaii’s to CA’s. I think Napili was voted best beach by someone, so I should have used quotes.