Netanya · Ra'anana · Herzliya · Caesarea
A home on the Israeli coast, bought with someone on your side.
Most of my clients buy from another country, in a language and a bureaucracy they do not command, and often before they have stood inside the apartment. I represent them from the first search to the day the furniture arrives.
Where I work
Four cities, and they are not interchangeable.
Netanya, Ra'anana, Herzliya and Caesarea sit within half an hour of each other and ask completely different things of you.
Netanya
The French-speaking anchor of this coast. A city on a cliff, with the beaches below and a centre that works on foot.
Ra'anana
Six kilometres inland, and the most Anglophone address on the list. Green, low-rise, and where a large share of olim actually settle.
Herzliya
Pituach at the water — marina, embassies, large plots. The rest of the city more ordinary, and considerably more affordable.
Caesarea
Planned, private and low-density. Houses rather than apartments, and the one place here where a car is not optional.
What you are deciding
You are not choosing a property yet. You are choosing who stands in the room when you cannot.
A purchase made from Paris, São Paulo, London or New York turns on questions a listing photograph cannot answer. Is the synagogue actually a walk, or a walk in good weather? Will that school absorb a child who arrives with no Hebrew? Does the seller's lawyer have any reason at all to protect you? Is the contractor's quote a price, or an opening position?
I answer those questions before they cost you anything. I work for the buyer, and independent judgement is the whole of what I offer.
What I do
Three services. Most people use all three.
Finding the apartment
A search led by your conditions rather than by what happens to be listed — including off-market property, which in this corridor is a meaningful share of what actually changes hands.
Contracts, documents and tax
Everything a foreign buyer is asked to produce, coordinated alongside the lawyer and the accountant who file it, and kept moving across time zones so nothing waits for you to wake up.
Renovation and furnishing
Contractors I have chosen and worked with before, supervised on your behalf, with the work photographed and written up as it goes. I am a painter. The eye is trained, and it is the reason this service exists.
Proof of method
What happens before you get on a plane.
The conversation
We talk about the life you intend to have here, not the square metres. Who is coming, how often, on what timetable, and what has to be within walking distance.
The written brief
I write down what I understood and send it back to you. If I misheard something, this is the stage where it costs nothing.
The shortlist
I visit. You get honest notes, including on the addresses I am ruling out and why. The ruling out is usually the more useful half.
The visit, or the video
If you can come, we see three or four in a day and you spend your time deciding rather than discovering. If you cannot, I walk each one on video, slowly, including the parts an agent would walk past.
The offer and the file
From here you have a lawyer, an accountant and me — and one person whose job is keeping the three of us in the same week.
How I qualify a property
Four questions I ask about every address.
- The synagogue
- Measured as a walk, in minutes — never as "close to". For a shomer Shabbat family this is a condition, not a preference, and an address that fails it fails completely, however good it looks.
- The schools
- Behind the catchment question is the one that rarely gets said out loud: what language will my child be taught in, and how is a foreign family actually absorbed here.
- The urban centre
- Whether daily life works without a car — pharmacy, market, clinic, bus. It is usually what decides whether a second home ever becomes a first one.
- The sea
- The emotional half of the purchase, and the reason most people started looking. It is real, and it is also the one thing that will not tell you whether you can live there.
Why me
Three languages, three cultures, one transaction.
I am French by origin, I did my university studies in Israel, and I spent most of my adult life in Brazil. That is not a biography, it is the working tool. On one side of the table sits a buyer thinking in French, English or Portuguese; on the other sit an Israeli seller, an Israeli notary and an Israeli contractor. I am at home on both sides, and nothing has to survive being translated twice.
Before you write
Questions I am asked first
Can I buy without being in Israel?
Do I need an Israeli lawyer?
What languages can we work in?
Do you only work with people making aliyah?
Are there properties listed on this site?
Next step
Tell me what you are looking for.
A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Twenty minutes is usually enough for both of us to know whether I am the right person for your purchase.
English · French · Portuguese · Hebrew
