Is it possible to buy a property in France from Australia??

[JMHouse]

Hi - was just wondering if anyone has or knows how to buy a property in France from Australia.

We will be visiting France in May for 2 weeks and looking at houses and hopefully put a deposit on one, however, the rest of the transaction may need to occur with us in Australia.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

[Bevdeforges]

Property transactions in France usually take a good three months to close. It's possible to give the notaire authority to act on your behalf, but you have to decide if you're comfortable with that (and it may involve an extra fee).
Cheers,
Bev

[RayRay]

Originally Posted by JMHouse

Hi - was just wondering if anyone has or knows how to buy a property in France from Australia.

We will be visiting France in May for 2 weeks and looking at houses and hopefully put a deposit on one, however, the rest of the transaction may need to occur with us in Australia.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

If purchasing from Australia is like buying from the US, I can assist. How easy it is will likely depend on your realtor (immobiliere), the land attorney (notaire), and whether they're familiar with purchasing property by telephone, email and mail.

We saw several properties during our vacation 2 years ago. We thought about buying one for 2-3 months after we returned to the US. Then, we telephoned and emailed our realtor to arrange the offer. After it was accepted, our realtor wrote up the formal offer and emailed it to us. We signed it and emailed it back to her as a PDF file. The sellers accepted and we were sent a copy of the fully executed offer.

At that point, we made the initial deposit of funds to notaire's account. We found a way to inexpensively transfer the funds in euros (i.e., with the least bank and transfer fees).

Two months or so later, the notaire sent us the full purchase and sale document. I translated it. My daughter read it in French and she had an attorney who's also fluent in French review it for us. It was surprisingly similar to US purchase documents.

We signed it, sent a PDF to the notaire and mailed him the signed original. The sellers did the same. Three or four months later, we were asked to deposit the balance of the funds into the notaire's account, which we did. Soon after, we received a fully executed copy of the agreement and the sale was concluded.

We opened a French bank account from the US with Barclays (the only bank we found with whom we could do so from outside of France). Our realtor then arranged for our water, electric, and telephone accounts to be billed to our French bank account. She also recommended an insuror in the village and we set up a policy for the house insurance. We arrived back in our village a few months later and got the keys from the realtor, bought furniture, and we've been enjoying it since.

It all seems rather easy in hindsight, but I do remember that there were some bumps along the way. Our realtor advised us quite a bit. She speaks some English. It also helped that the notaire's assistant spoke some English. Both, BTW, far better than we spoke French at that time. When we realized the enormous fees our bank proposed to charge us to transfer our dollars into euros, we were sick until we found a way to avoid those fees using a Forex company I discovered. Similarly, opening the French bank account from the US took two false starts with Lloyds and another bank before we found success with Barclays.

I think that we were fortunate in that we found people we liked, decided to trust them, and got excellent advice.

Good luck.

Ray

[JMHouse]

Thanks Bev

Thanks Ray for the detailed response - much appreciated

[rynd2it]

Originally Posted by JMHouse

Hi - was just wondering if anyone has or knows how to buy a property in France from Australia.

We will be visiting France in May for 2 weeks and looking at houses and hopefully put a deposit on one, however, the rest of the transaction may need to occur with us in Australia.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

Ray's experience is great but I would add that finding a suitable property in two weeks is very ambitious. We visited three times and then moved here and rented. It took us weeks to find a house and it has turned out to be a much bigger project than anyone imagined.

You can do a lot of internet searching but estate agents won't tell you much about the property unless you are standing in front of them. This is to stop you avoiding their fees. Also beware that if two agents show you the same house and you buy it, you'll pay two fees.

There are a couple of threads on here about house hunting, it's not like the UK, US or Australia.

Good luck

[RayRay]

Originally Posted by rynd2it

Ray's experience is great but I would add that finding a suitable property in two weeks is very ambitious.

David is right. We were VERY lucky. We didn't intend to buy a house. Though to be fair, we were opposed to it, dreamed of it, but didn't think it was very sensible.

My wife was a flight attendant for American Airlines, which made vacationing in France a bit easier, and we have friends who live in France, as well. On that trip, we had booked 10 days at a B&B, but stayed several days longer when that volcano in Iceland erupted a couple of years ago and grounded all the flights.

We have made looking at real estate a bit of a hobby and we had already looked longingly in the windows of two immobilieres in our village. So... we knocked on the door of the one we liked the looks of best and were very fortunate that Madame spoke a bit of English.

We told her what we were looking for, she suggested 3 houses and asked us to return the next day. We fell in love with the very first one she showed us in the haute village. We left for Paris on the train a couple of days later, having done nothing more than ask if it were possible to buy a house from the US. I suspect Madame thought she'd never hear from us again.

We kicked it around for a month or two after we returne and decided NOT to buy the house. That seemed like the reght decision... until I said to my wife, "So, you're OK if someone else buys the little house?" Well, that did it. We called Madame, asked how to make an offer and off we went.

As I said, very, very lucky. We have the best neighbors. We've met exceptional craftsmen who've done some work on our house, and we love it.

Good luck.

Ray