So you’ve found your dream house in France, signed the Compromis de Vente, paid your deposit, survey done, the searches have been completed and you’ve agreed a date for signing the Acte de Vente. So what happens next? Well the first thing to do is ensure that the Notaire receives all of the requested funds prior to the agreed date, if they don’t then nothing will be happening. Make sure you allow plenty of time for this, banks (both in the UK and France) seem reluctant to let go of your money once it’s going through their systems! Once that hurdle is crossed you just need to get yourself out to France for the big day. If you don’t want to attend the signing then you can sign power of attorney to somebody else.

We signed for our Gite in Brittany on a Friday in June in 2007, so we got the Ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe and drove down to Brittany on Thursday. We stayed at a really lovely B&B on the Thursday night, overlooking the very picturesque Rance estuary. We arrived at about 4pm to tea and biscuits on the patio on a really beautiful day, which was really nice after driving for just under 4 hours. We only booked the one night as we were planning on staying at our new home over the weekend so we hoped the sale would go through, otherwise we were homeless!!

Friday lunchtime we went to the gite (luckily we still had the location of the gite in Tom Tom so we could find it again, as it had been 4  months since we had last been there on our house hunting trip) to meet the current owners and Megan, who had been handling the whole legal side for us from the Immobliers. It is very important that you visit the property you are buying before you sign as you are buying “Sold as Seen”, so make sure that everything is still there that you expect to be – roof, walls, floors etc. After checking that the property was in a fit state and we were happy for the sale to go ahead we all trooped off to the Notaire’s in Caulnes. The Notaire was really nice and explained everything that was happening and what the documents were that we were signing.

As we were taking out a communauté universelle, to ensure that the property and any others we purchased in the future would be passed direct;y to the surviving spouse, we signed this first to ensure that it was in place prior to our purchase of the gite. Once that was done we went through each page of the Acte de Vente and all parties had to sign each page. The current owners explained that when they bought the place there were 14 people who had a share of the house (as we have said, Inheritance law in France is very different) who all had to sign, so that took quite a long time!!

Having signed the Acte de Vente the Notaire gave the existing owners a cheque, minus any taxes due, and we received the keys. That was it, we were now the proud owners of a lovely gite in Brittany. The Notaire explained that we would receive a copy of the deeds a few months later after the new ownership had been registered. The whole process had probably taken about an hour and the girls had been playing very nicely in the corner for most of it, with only the odd interruption!

So we got back in our car, packed with things for the gite, and drove back to our new house, where we could unpack and make it our holiday home, and also start getting things ready for the guests that were due in just over a month.

Overall it was a really nice experience, with the support of Megan from the Immobliers and the very nice Notaire everything went smoothly, we knew what was happening at every stage and we understood, as far as you can understand legal documents, what we were signing.

 2 Bedroom Self Catering Cottage / Gite near Dinan, Brittany, France

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2007