Buying a house in France: not easy!
As with most things in France, other than buying a baguette and going to the restaurant, buying a house is much more complicated than in North America.
FEES:
There are fees of course:
- Homes are not all listed in all real estate agencies. I know of one network, ORPI, that lists its properties through all its network’s agencies, but this is a recent and novel approach.
- Agency fees are about 6% (but run from 5% to 10% depending on the price of the home)
- State fees are about 8% on homes more than five years old, and 4% on recent homes.
So that’s right there between 10% and 14% of the house’ s cost in fees!
Then there’s the administrative hassles.
LEGAL and ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTRAINTS :
Think you’d like to renovate, and maybe add some rooms to your new property? You’ll have to ask for a building permit ( ‘permis de construire’), which may take up to 3 months to be granted or refused, for reasons you often do not completely understand.
There are rules pertaining to the land you may be buying, restricting how much you can enlarge the home. In one instance, even though the house is on 5 800 square meters of land, ten minutes from a city, the only possibility is to enlarge up to twice the size of the existing home. In this case it was not a huge home, with 170 square meters. This means the owners can only up to 85 square meters to the home, leaving a huge part of the land unused for housing- thereby reducing its value.
Information on the land and the home is supposed to be maintained by the local town hall ( at what is called ‘ le cadastre’) , but it is often incomplete and not considered as legal proof.
In conclusion, be forewarned, buying a home in France is an adventure!
France Home Finance is a Paris-based company I’m familiar with who helps non resident buyers find loans.
- > Here’s a good page they have on buying a home in France.
