You might do better to line up some sort of vacation rental for a month or two to cover your September arrival, with a plan to do your apartment hunting on arrival. You really can't secure a longer term place (like, with a standard 3 year lease) until you're on site and have your French bank account set up (needed for your credit evaluation).
First thing to understand is that the real estate agency business works considerably differently in France than it does in the US. Normally, apartments don't really get posted as being on the market until a month or two before they become available. This year is going to be somewhat trickier, what with the Olympics in France (and I think there are at least a couple events scheduled for Toulouse).You might do better to line up some sort of vacation rental for a month or two to cover your September arrival, with a plan to do your apartment hunting on arrival. You really can't secure a longer term place (like, with a standard 3 year lease) until you're on site and have your French bank account set up (needed for your credit evaluation).
Thanks, Bev. Good advice. Kinsale
Both of the apartments that we liked required a guarantee, for which we used garantme.fr which both landlords were prepared to accept. We opened a bank account at Crédit Agricole, which took a couple of weeks to complete including an hour and a half interview with the bank officer. You will need to prepare a dossier to demonstrate your financial capability. We included our 2023 IRS Form 1040 (summary and Form C), three months of statements from all of our US banks, attestation d'hébergement, benefit statement from the SSA, our own summary of all income including non-taxable and net worth, and the application form from the rental agent.
Vrbo.com or cocoonr.fr are better bets than airbnb. It is important that you get an attestation d'hébergement from your short-term rental which should show the seal of the agency and a signature. You won't get a bank account without it.
We set up three one-month rentals in advance so that if we found lodging by June we could cancel the July rental which we did.
Good luck to you. Toulouse is worth the hassle.
Our experience was very similar except the level of interest in our dossier was much lower. We were able to view about 5% of the properties we thought we wanted. The ones we could have had after viewing were mostly disappointing. What we ended up with is OK, but really noisy and hard to deal with parking the car. I would love to find a better rental , but don't really want to do it all over again. Still don't really know where, or even IF (pending elections) , I want to buy a house.