If you think you’ve been priced out of the Australian residential property market but are still in love with an asset that you can reach out and touch, how does a restored stone-farmhouse in France sound.

Indeed, if you have been limiting your residential real estate options to Australia, now is the time to look offshore. There are cheap properties available all around the world and there’s no shortage of people spruiking to sell them at the moment.

But if you do decide to look at houses overseas, make sure you apply the same rigorous checks you’d make if you were buying something at home. You wouldn’t buy a car from overseas sight unseen without at least paying a mechanic to have a look at it. A property shouldn’t be any different.

If we’ve piqued your interest, then read on to learn more about the European property market and and how you can get exposure to it.

Central London

Some parts of Europe are pretty much a basket case but others are emerging from the doldrums. High-end markets, such as central London, are starting to provide good investment opportunities again as prices stabilise and rents increase.

Sue Foxley, head of research at property consultant Cluttons, says prices have risen by 2.2 per cent in central London so far this year. “That’s more than what we saw in all of last year,” she says.

The growth is very much driven by supply shortages, Foxley says. “We’ve got a lot of demand coming through – first-home buyers, overseas buyers.”

Rental value growth was 3.1 per cent in the first quarter, down from 7.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2010 but 19.1 per cent higher than a year earlier.

Foxley says investors in central London – up to 50 per cent of them overseas buyers – generally are prepared to accept lower yields because of the higher expected capital growth. “In central London we’re more exposed to a global economy and global growth,” she says.

Foreign interest ranges from Chinese investors buying for their children to Middle Eastern investors who live in the UK capital for part of the year.

“What we’ve seen over the past six months is a diversifying impact,” Foxley says. “It’s a market that’s well known. It’s considered safe. It’s transparent.”

Ireland

Other European property markets have other issues. Ireland may have experienced some of the biggest increases in property values during the boom but has suffered a shuddering crash since.

“Ireland had sensational growth in the upswing – it was probably one of the highest-growth markets in the world,” Macquarie Bank’s head of property research, Rod Cornish, says. “When you consider the size of the population and employment capacity it was far too extreme, and associated with that there was far too much building.”

There weren’t enough people to keep buying the properties being built and as a result there are tremendously cheap houses available at the moment – but it may be a market to avoid for a few more years.

Germany

In Germany, the property market has been stagnant for the past 12 months, Cornish says.

“It didn’t really necessarily fall that much but hardly rose in the upswing and hasn’t done anything in the meantime.”

Spain and France

Spain and France are countries attracting interest, if website searches are anything to go by. UK website Rightmove Overseas says that in March it recorded a 27 per cent rise in searches on properties in Spain and a 17 per cent rise for France.

Country properties in France can be had for less than $300,000. The three-bedroom, restored stone farmhouse is near Limoges, four hours drive from Paris and a few hours drive from Bordeaux (a village house in Chalus, Limousin, built in 1900 with separate garage and workshop and small orchard; offered for 218,000 euros through rightmove.co.uk earlier this year).