So here is the house we chose after much soul searching. It's in a tiny hamlet of just 4 houses so doesn't need a name or number. And on Tuesday it becomes ours, but there's an awful lot happened between finding the house and it becoming ours!!
We've been really lucky with our estate agents who has been amazing - and no she hasn't paid us a penny to say that, neither has Leggetts! But more about that in a minute...
So we liked the house, wanted to buy it and what happens next? Well just like in the UK you put in an offer, negotiate until you agree a price, and bingo! You have a house! No it's not quite that simple obviously!! We did the negotiating through our estate agent who is actually Scottish, has lived in France for 11 years and speaks fluent French. She's been truly amazing!
We offered 85% of the asking price, and then negotiated over a couple of days up to 92% of the asking price, but that price includes the estate agents fees. Now like I said we've been amazingly lucky with our estate agent and she agreed to take a cut of 20% on her fee in order to get the deal agreed. There's a lot of "hidden" fees when you buy a house in France so don't expect the figure you agree to pay for the house will be the final bill because it won't. There's the notaires fees (in our case around 10,000 euros), fees on any bank loan/mortgage, tax fonciere(council rates which have to be paid for the rest of the year when you sign for the house), translators fees of 120 euros (legal requirement) and I'm sure I've missed one or two!! So make sure if you're buying that you allow enough of a cushion in your funds to cover all these extras.
French loans/mortgages tend to be at a interest rate than you might expect, but there are an awful lot of hoops to jump through before a French bank will agree it. Expect to provide copious amounts of paperwork and expect it to take three times longer than you expect or the bank says! For example I was divorced well over 30 years ago and have been married to my current husband for just over 30 years but they still wanted a copy of my divorce certificate!! That was tricky! Thank goodness I'm on good terms with my ex husbands wife who was able to provide me with a copy cos I couldn't find mine!
So the advice for today is make sure you have lots of copies of every legal document you own! Birth, marriage, divorce certificates, passports, proof of current address, and anything else you can find!! Better to have too many than not enough!
We went through a LOT of stress over the finances, because, although we put our house on the market in November expecting it to sell fairly quickly so also thought we wouldn't need to borrow any money, it didn't actually sell any where near as quickly as we thought it would. On top of that we expected the French bank to do what they said they would do when they said they would do it. Neither of these things happened and there was a point at which we thought the purchase would fall through for any number of reasons but, again, we have been really lucky and the vendors have been brilliant! They've been tolerant and understanding of the delays. They could have claimed our deposit as we couldn't complete when we should have according to the Acte de copromis (more on that next time) but they didn't. They allowed us to deliver some stuff to the house 2 weeks before we completed and they were so friendly and accommodating, and we tried out our best French on them and they didn't laugh once!!
I truly hope that anyone else who buys a house in France is as lucky as we have been. Next time the Acte de compromis and what that actually means!
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