Now, with our search area increased to cover a larger area of Nantes proper, we started to pull up houses and apartments that ticked some of the boxes we had. Must-haves got relegated to “nice-to haves” and new boxes got added to the list. It was a very stressful time. Frantic emails and texts and conference calls to our house-hunting agency, hours of online searching, a decision to increase our monthly rental budget, all to find a seemingly impossible place to live. We had no idea it would be so competitive and that there’d be so few properties.