What it costs to buy here, worked through one apartment

Nothing stops you buying

There is no nationality restriction on owning property in France. Residency, tax and inheritance are separate questions with separate answers, and they are worth paid advice before you sign rather than after. What follows is not that advice. It is what our own completed files look like when you add them up.

The apartment

On the climb above the covered hall in Ondrieu-sur-Mer. 140 m² across two floors of an old town house, with a courtyard at the back and no garage. It completed in February at €1,246,000, which is the going rate per square metre in that town almost to the euro. Every figure below comes off that one file.

What went on top of the price

The transfer costs came to just under €95,000. That is the number people call notaire fees, and it is mostly not the notaire. The notaire’s own fee was about a fifth of it. The rest is tax, collected for the state and the commune and passed straight through.

The one new build we have closed at a comparable price came in at under a third of that total, because old and new are taxed on different scales. The rates get changed, so ask what they are on the day you budget. Budget from the old-house number anyway. Almost everything we sell is an old house.

Agency commission is a separate question and a bigger one. Sometimes it sits inside the displayed price and sometimes it is added on top, which moves your total by six figures on a file this size. Ask which convention a listing uses before you compare two of them. Ours says so on every price line.

The compromis is the real contract

Buyers from common-law countries read the compromis de vente as an offer letter. It is not. Once it is signed and the withdrawal window has run, both sides are committed, and your deposit is exposed if you walk away for a reason nobody wrote down.

The conditions suspensives are that list of written reasons. A mortgage condition is the usual one. Two more from our own files: a plot at Castel-Ourbanne where the buyer made the sale conditional on the granted planning permission surviving the transfer, and a mas above Sarnaude-la-Bastide where the access track crossed a neighbour’s field, so the right of way went into the contract in words rather than into a conversation on the terrace. Both completed. Neither buyer would have had a way out if those clauses had been left where they started.

The withdrawal window

French law gives the buyer a fixed period after signature to withdraw with no reason and no penalty. The seller has no equivalent right. The length is set by statute, it has been changed before, and how the days are counted matters as much as the number, so take the current rule from your notaire in writing rather than from this page.

What we can tell you is where sales actually die. Of the eight files that fell over for us in the last two years, six fell on the mortgage condition and none on the withdrawal window. Spend your attention on the lender.

Then it takes months

Between the compromis and the acte de vente sit the searches, the commune’s right of pre-emption and your lender. Across the sales we closed last year the median run was 17 weeks. The quickest was nine. The slowest was seven months, and that one was the commune taking its full window on a house it never had any intention of buying. Budget months, not weeks. The keys move at the acte, and not one day before.