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We are in the beginning stages of working with a notaire. In general, a French  notaire is a legal specialist who draws up authenticated contracts on behalf of his clients. In the case of a house purchase, it is fairly common – although not required – for the buyer and the seller to use the same notaire. How will the notaire help you buy a house?

The notaire will (according to my research):

• prepare the final deed
• obtain all the searches regarding the property in question
• do all the necessary checks regarding right to sell and right to purchase
• check the title of the property to make sure it doesn’t contain any clauses that might cause a problem in the transaction or might have an adverse effect on the value of the property either at the time of purchase or in the future
• Ensure that there are no mortgages outstanding on the property

We have opted to use the same notaire as our sellers. They are English and have used this notaire in the past, and we’re comfortable doing the same. This has been our experience with the notaire to date – we’re in the early stages, so we’re sure there’s more to come.

Salutations, mes amis!

<warning: heavy use of Google Translate used in this and all subsequent posts>

This website and blog are a result of doing a lot of research  and wishing we had a go-to place for information for Americans on the home-buying process in France.

We’re doing it – we’re making the dream happen! To be truthful, it’s a fairly new dream of ours. We started exploring the idea of owning a second home in France in early 2018. We browsed through several online real estate offerings (we like http://www.rightmove.co.uk) and did some initial research into the home-buying process in France. Our goal for buying a house was 2019 or 2020.

But fate has a way of messing with well-laid plans sometimes. We had a trip planned to Europe in July 2018, and decided to extend our stay in France one week to further explore regions in which we were interested in buying. In the meantime, we had found a house in Burgundy online that we fell in love with from afar. We contacted the owners before we left on our trip, and agreed to meet up, visit the house, and discuss the ex-pat experience of buying in France (they are British).

Long story short, our visit to Quincerot was life-changing! On our long trip home from Paris to San Francisco, we discussed our options and decided we had to try to make this work, because we had inadvertently found the perfect house for us now, not 1-2 years in the future.

So in tandem with learning the intricacies of the French home-buying process, we decided to attempt to share our experiences with others in the hope that what we learn along the way might be useful to someone else down the road.