Buy a cheap property in France, do it up and rent it out – while cashing in: for decades this has been the retirement dream of many British people. The advent of gîte holidays in the 1950s offered a great way for many Francophiles to have an adventure, hosting paying guests in self-contained houses on the property. You could run a gîte to top up your pension, while living a low-cost life in “la France profonde”. And you could even manage to do it without speaking fluent French, as many of the tourists were British – plus, there were better tax allowances for gîtes than for long-term lets. But in the past four years, Brexit, Covid and the cost of living crisis have hit British gîte owners with a series of challenges. With the French government introducing some tax changes to holiday rentals too – is this the end of the gîte dream? The golden age for British gîte ownership was during the 1990s to 2010s – when low-cost airlines opened up locations such as Bergerac and Limoges, and Airbnb began to transform the way many people booked holidays. A lot of owners bought in the 1970s and...