Sample Extract from Selling French Dreams

You can buy a house in France either through an immobilier (estate agent) or a notaire (solicitor). Of the two, the immobilier is certainly the most ‘user friendly’. His office is easy to find, his property details generally good, and he may well be open (lunch permitting!)

The notaire is different. His etude is often hard to find, while to see the maitre himself, you will probably need an appointment. There is very little chance that the good man will speak English, and his property details will probably be scanty.

There are, however, a good many reasons why it is worth getting a good look at the maitre’s properties despite all these problems. One is the incredible bargains that can be found from time to time, such as the little place shown to me by my good friend Monsieur Bernard.

The owner had died and the house was being sold by the deceased’s nephew - a Parisian. Bernard filled me in about the place as we drove along.

"It’s not the main house which is up for sale. That’s a fine place - a veritable mansion with a sweeping drive. Posh. The nephew wants to keep that for himself. What he doesn’t want, and this is where you come in, Alain, is the little house that came with the main one. C’est petite. However, it has a bit of land with it, and a nice orchard."

The house was indeed a little place. The notaire’s details described it simply as ‘house with slate roof’. Free standing, rose-granite, one up and two down, with a barn on the end. I suppose it measured about twenty five feet by twelve. It came with five acres of woodlands, ferns and fields - the size of a small park in Britain. The place was on sale for about ten thousand pounds.

What made it interesting was that the owner, so Bernard said, would accept considerably less. Five thousand pounds, maybe four. He didn’t particularly need the money - he was a dammed Parisian wasn’t he - he just wanted to get shot of the place. It had been on the notaire’s books for a year now.

This was one of those astonishing bargains which one occasionally saw when a house was for sale only with a notaire who didn’t take too much interest in selling property (usually only a minor part of his job). For one reason or another - lack of advertising, or a poor filing system perhaps - a property which had been good value to start with had failed to sell. The owner wanted to be rid of the place and so, unaware that the fault lay more with his notaire than with the price he was asking, he lowered that price to a ludicrous level.

For the cost of a not particularly expensive second-hand car, one could buy a very pretty house and a mini-farm. The house might be small but it had potential. The barn was the key to that. Incorporating it into the house would allow two, maybe three, bedrooms. The structure was excellent and that slate roof was good.

I had come across - and sold - such bargains before. This one I wanted for myself. It would make an ideal Marchand de Biens.

The Marchand de Biens is an illustration of how utterly different the French property system is from the British one. French people tend not to move much. That’s not surprising when they can expect to pay a hefty whack to the government for the privilege of doing so, and high commission fees on top of that.

So, a few years back, in an attempt to kick-start the market, the government brought in the legal status of Marchand de Biens (literally dealer in real estate), which carries very significant tax advantages.

The ethics of this may seem a bit ‘dodgy’; that is, an estate agent buying and selling property is in a somewhat privileged position. In this instance, I didn’t see a problem with it.