How to buy a house!...
So, dreaming about buying a house in France is one thing, but how do you actually go about doing it? We started by looking at properties advertised by estate agents ('immobilier') via websites such as Greenacres and JB French Houses. It is also common in France for properties to be sold by the solicitor handling the sale ('notaire') or people sometimes just put up a handwritten sign and a mobile number! This is great if you have time to drive around the french countryside looking for signs, but we really didn't.
Next we took a few trips over to look at places in May 2016 but didn't see anything we loved enough to buy. This helped a lot, because when we saw the house we eventually bought, we knew straight away it was what we were looking for. So much so that we took a chance and made an offer without even seeing it (although our friend Trevor did have a look through the windows - easy as some were broken!!).
You are expected to pay a holding deposit (we paid around 10%), and you then meet with the notaire and seller to sign an initial contract (this also gave us a chance to have a better look at what we were buying). You then have a 10 day cooling off period when you can change your mind. After this, you're committed to buy. We went back a few weeks later to complete and sign final paperwork (you have to have the money available by then, but more on that in a later post...)
A quick note about price: it's worth checking whether the advertised price includes fees. We bought directly from a notaire, and paid the sale price and approximately 9% extra for costs (including legal fees). Also different in France compared to the UK is that you don't employ your own solicitor. One notaire manages the whole sale and looks after the interests of both parties.
Now, all of these meetings with solicitors are fine and dandy, but if you're anything like me, GCSE-level conversational french just won't cut it! Indeed, I've yet to find a context in which to use "Ou est la plume de ma tante?" but I live in hope... To avoid any confusion (and make sure we knew what the hell we were signing) we used an interpreter, which was a great move as they also usually have some legal knowledge as well as local knowledge. Once all of the meetings are done and dusted we were given an enormous key and the house was all ours......
Next we took a few trips over to look at places in May 2016 but didn't see anything we loved enough to buy. This helped a lot, because when we saw the house we eventually bought, we knew straight away it was what we were looking for. So much so that we took a chance and made an offer without even seeing it (although our friend Trevor did have a look through the windows - easy as some were broken!!).
You are expected to pay a holding deposit (we paid around 10%), and you then meet with the notaire and seller to sign an initial contract (this also gave us a chance to have a better look at what we were buying). You then have a 10 day cooling off period when you can change your mind. After this, you're committed to buy. We went back a few weeks later to complete and sign final paperwork (you have to have the money available by then, but more on that in a later post...)
A quick note about price: it's worth checking whether the advertised price includes fees. We bought directly from a notaire, and paid the sale price and approximately 9% extra for costs (including legal fees). Also different in France compared to the UK is that you don't employ your own solicitor. One notaire manages the whole sale and looks after the interests of both parties.
Now, all of these meetings with solicitors are fine and dandy, but if you're anything like me, GCSE-level conversational french just won't cut it! Indeed, I've yet to find a context in which to use "Ou est la plume de ma tante?" but I live in hope... To avoid any confusion (and make sure we knew what the hell we were signing) we used an interpreter, which was a great move as they also usually have some legal knowledge as well as local knowledge. Once all of the meetings are done and dusted we were given an enormous key and the house was all ours......
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