Disclaimer: this is the experience we had. At no point is this article representative for other experiences, nor is this article giving legal advice and I therefore cannot be held responsible for any action taken based on this article.
Personally, we had two completely different experiences. And not only were the workings completely different, but also - particularly in the first case - the solicitor (notary public) eventually disappeared and the case was dragged for six years and eventually passed on to a different solicitor. So I will try to keep the two experience separate.
- Experience 1 - take-over of family home + unreliable solicitor
- Experience 2 - buying a property through a property agent / website (still ongoing)
We have joined a few Facebook groups specialising in buying property in France or renovating in France, followed by legal and fiscal self-help groups. So I do understand that experiences differ vastly. As you will see, there are also different ways of buying a property which in itself may have a completely different setup. So let's go through our experience taking on our family home.
Experience 1 - Family Home
We originally started this process in 2018, when my dad contacted the local solicitor and asked them to pass on his property to me as a gift from parent to child. The intention was to bypass an inheritance issue, whereby each child will be given a percentage of the property and therefore continuously splitting the property into smaller and smaller bits, making it even more unmanageable. My dad owned the property with his siblings and we wanted to avoid causing even more issues, the plan was to pay-out my siblings if they were to agree.
My dad's siblings contacted the solicitor at the same time, in writing, and asked them to sell their share of the property to me as well as they had children themselves and wanted to use the money to support them in their retirement. One would think, this would be a straightforward case, but it wasn't.
By 2020, nothing had been done yet and many letters and emails were sent to the solicitor to start everything off. To be fair, we also had discussions, whether my aunt really wanted to sell her share or wait until she passed away, so there was a slight of a couple of months, but nothing that would justify such an extrem delay.
Let's assume for a moment, that all went without an issue, my aunt and my uncle were asked to get a diagnostics report for the house. So an appointment was made and a guy came in and had a look around the house to look for anything that would be important, i.e. energy efficiency of the house (particularly for all old houses, this is quite important), but also issues like troublesome, faulty or outdated electricty installations (power sockets with burn marks, cables not being insulated or earthed), potential asbestos contamination, natural dangers like flooding, earthquakes, radiation or even artificial ones - and you will find that a lot in France - proximity to a nuclear power plant. Whoever sells the property, will be responsible for this service. In case of a gift, this process can be skipped.
After this, a compromis will be drawn up by the notary. It is literally a draft of the contract one would sign at the end of the transfer. In my case, I was sent a word document with the draft, I replied by email, that all was in order, and a final contract would be drawn up with all the information required.
We had the feeling that the solicitor was a bit lazy. We just had the sale contract with the basic information of plots, sizes and worth, resulting in a few pages, in contrast to my brother's paperwork (100+ pages). As I was in the UK at the time, I was unable to sign the document in person. So I was required to sign a procura document giving the solicitor the power to sign in my name. In my case, I needed a witness, i.e. a British solicitor.
Once more, this were different times. It was COVID and lockdown, so our British solicitor witnessed me signing the documents via videolink, I scanned the documents and emailed them and in return I received a document that my signature was genuine and that the solicitor can sign the documents in my name.
With this the final sales contract was then drawn up and signed. In France it seems to be common practice that each page of the contract gets its initials and the last page will have your full signature.
For the final part, the gift of my dad's, it got a bit more complicated. Generally in France it seems they don't like power of attorney for these situations. As I was unable to travel (still COVID) I basically had to find a solicitor in the UK that had a "notary" license for France, that also spoke fluent French in order to go through the paperwork with me in person, so I could sign locally and then had this posted to France.
What went wrong:
Well, quite honestly, what did not go wrong? First of all one has to expect that answers to emails will not be given as fast as one would be used to in Germany or the UK. Sometimes days or weeks can go by.
But in our case it was a bit extrem. The notary public in our town did not respond in months, eventually went AWOL and could not get hold of anymore. Eventually (we're in 5 years by then) I contacted a different solicitor asking to complete the outstanding issue (at which point I had also contacted a lawyer, as mediation service also failed). Unfortunately the other solicitor could not just take over, but got me in touch with a solicitor office that was covering the paperwork during our solicitor's "absence".
What basically happened: the solicitor made a mistake (she blamed it on her accounting lady) for which reason the land registry refused to complete the sale of the properties. That was back in 2020. However, as I had a land registry extract sent to me for confirmation, I was told that the properties are not mine, because the paperwork was refused to be signed of. Apparently the solicitor was informed about this, but they didn't tell me and they didn't tell anyone about it. So I had to get back in touch and ask them to sort this out.
I thought dealing with the absence covering solicitor will be a bit easier. It was promising at first as they were a bit more responsive by e-mail (I started sending e-mails with delivery and read receipts, for obvious reasons) but the case still dragged on and it wasn't resolved for quite a while either. As originally pointed out, from first instruction (July 2018) to "completion" it took 6 years. We're now in July 2024 and there are still issues. For example the house has a co-ownership. Whilst I am the sole owner of land and house, the co-ownership has not been dissolved which prevents me from merging the property with the garden plots. Once more the solicitor is not replying, so this is an issue that will need sorting out separately.
I highly recommend keeping all your records, use delivery and read receipt functions of your e-mail program. I sometimes refuse telephone calls simply because of things like that. My dad even sent registered/signed for letters to which he did not get replies.
Maybe I will cover the bases for a complaints process in another post, otherwise this article will just blow out of proportion. 😉
Experience 2 - Property Website / Agent
My brother recently went through the sales process through a property agent from one of the online property websites. This process was a bit easier, mainly also because the property agent helped with the communication and organisation of things. Not only for the seller of the property, but also for my brother, the buyer.
Unfortunately they were using the same solicitor as with us. Though the absence cover dealt with it from the start, the process still was not quite as smooth as one would hope.
For the sales process it was the same thing though. A diagnostic report was made, a draft of the contract prepared and both sent to my brother to read through and confirm that he was OK with it before the final documents were drafted.
However, there was big difference which is quite an important one:
His property came with a lot of plots of land. From what I am understanding, if there is a certain size of agricultural land involved, a government instituation called SAFER will get involved. SAFER job is to make sure that agricultural land can be continued to be used as agricultural land. So they will either work as a middle man and ask you to rent out the land to an artisan/farmer and draw up the paperwork for the lease. Or they will buy the land off you and then pass it on separately. There were quite a few issues we did not understand. Many people claimed that only ALL or NO plots can be bought, which made no sense whatsoever. When we talked to SAFER, we were told certain plots can be kept if we wanted to.
Another issue that arose was the fact, that some land had a certain amount of forest on it. There were actually two issues with this: in our area, if the forest is above 3 hectars, the local council has the "first right to refuse", basically take the land off you (for current market value) and reintegrate it with the land the local council owns already.
Secondly, if one of these forest plots is also connected to a council forest (or roughly translated a community forest, basically provided by the local council) then as well the local council has the "first right to refuse" before the buyer can take the plots off the seller's hands.
Through the whole time, the property agent had been quite helpful, she spoke a bit of English, generally answered all the questions and also kept the ball rolling.
What went wrong...
In my brother's case, the solicitor's office did apparently not add up the figures properly (or forgot... hard to tell) and they forgot to ask the council whether they would like to buy the land. The solicitor also failed to inform SAFER on time, which put SAFER under a lot of pressure. Now technically - the way I understood it - SAFER can delay the procedure in order to give them the amount of time that they legally have. But in my brother's case the lady was very efficient and dealt with it quickly. So of all the bad things we heard in review portals and on Facebook groups that deal with this kind of things, that really did not happen here. Though to be fair, in one of the Facebook groups we are in, the feedback was almost entirely positive. There are some negatives about SAFER, but this is nothing that should be in this article, nor did it really apply to us anyway.
So in the end the sales process had to be delayed as the council had to be asked whether they want the land or not.