Actually purchasing an apartment in France.
Sign this. Again. Again. And Again.
The last thing we told you about our real estate journey was that we had found an apartment we loved in Montpellier and made an offer that was accepted. We drank champagne that night and felt high about the decision we’d made.
We returned to the apartment two days later with our agent Agnès so that we could sign the Offer D’Achat (purchase offer). When we arrived the seller gave us a more detailed tour. He seemed like a nice man who genuinely cared about us enjoying our new home. He showed us some water damage in the ceiling and explained that it was a "common area" problem which required his insurance company to negotiate with the HOA (Translation: this is a big headache.) He assured us it would be fixed before we moved in. He also explained that due to the hardness of the water (the large presence of calcium in the water) it was important to run the water regularly. He would be moving out at the end of the month, and therefore someone would need to come to the apartment and run the water between then and whenever we took ownership (March? July? 2025?). I had no idea how we would negotiate this, but, like a teenager in love, I decided that this was nothing compared to my need for this apartment.
We finally sat down to look at the contract. It stated that we "The Offerer declares his intention to acquire the above-mentioned property for the price of blah blah blah." It also included a list of the furniture that we wanted to purchase. However, during the tour the seller had offered us more of his furniture, and we were happy to take it. We were hoping to pay him cash separately, but he was having none of that. He wanted to have the extra furniture added into the contract. So the one we signed that night became a place holder until the additional furniture was added to the list. I didn’t love this. I wanted the final contract signed so we could pay the deposit and have things moving forward.
Little did I know how far we were from things moving forward.
With many assurances from our real estate agent that everything would be fine, we flew home two days after signing the tentative Purchase Offer.
The revised contract including the additional furniture arrived the Monday after we returned home (having more experience with French bureaucracy now, this feels to me like a minor miracle.) We were to use a program similar to DocuSign to sign, but the app had the delightful feature of not texting you a security code but calling you with one, which of course was in French. I needed to be around to translate for Roberto, but he managed to get his signed.
For some reason, the system refused to call me with the code, even thought I attempted it roughly 2000 times. Agnès suggested several very simple/obvious fixes which never worked. Finally, Roberto and I determined that the problem was that I was attempting to access the system very early in the morning. (Part of the frustration of doing business with the French is that you basically get one shot a day to communicate—one email when you wake up. They will see it after lunch their time, and will not answer it until the next day. It is, in a word, infuriating.)
We realized that each time I’d accessed the document to sign, due to the early hour, Do Not Disturb on my iPhone was still engaged! So my phone would not ring when the bot called me with the security code. I would try so many times the system would lock me out for 24 hours, so trying again later in the day was futile. (Hmm. Maybe it was Roberto who figured this out and I am giving myself half credit in retrospect? But I am going to leave it this way since I did translate that security code for him.)
Eventually we both got the document signed, and we sat back, relieved, ready for step two: the deposit.
That’s when we got the email from Agnès. There was a mistake in the contract. We needed to sign it again. We were not pleased, but at least we knew how to make it go smoothly this time. We signed. And we waited. We got a new email: there is another mistake in the contract. You need to sign AGAIN.
Wait. Aren’t the French supposed to be the best at tiny details? Don’t they take forever at everything because they are so rigorous about the small facts?
We signed again. We signed the contract so many times we started to wonder if they were throwing in new tiny clauses like “No English may be spoken in the apartment,” or “The seller may drop in at any time to take a bath.”
When the final contract was finally accepted, I asked where I should send the deposit. I got no answer.
I eventually learned this was because we were sooo far from that stage of the process. You see, we had only signed the purchase “offer." Now the notaire, the government official would be hired, and they would create the purchase “agreement." After we signed the purchase agreement, we would wire the deposit. The French government then had two months to declare eminent domain and seize the property to create a superhighway or super bakery or whatever. If that didn’t happen, then we could close.
This is a good time to reminisce about the number of times Roberto and I told each other how chill we would be about the closing date. "It doesn’t matter. We aren’t in a hurry. It will take as long as it takes." I should have known I was full of shit. I don’t like hovering in uncertainty. And without a closing date, I couldn’t buy plane tickets, Roberto couldn’t ask for time off work, and I couldn’t be sure about scheduling my summer work schedule. I didn’t mind a long closing period. I just wanted a date.
Agnès asked if we were okay using the notaire that her agency recommended. The notaire fulfills the same duties as a title company. We had read that if you use the same notaire as the seller it will save time. Representing neither buyer nor seller, the notaire works for the government and gets a government set fee. So using only one instead of two seemed fine.
What we did not consider was that the notaire that they hired speaks no English. So they had to hire a government translator, and every document has to be officially stamped by the translator before it is sent to us. This is required by French law, so it it very good for us in the long term, but if we had known, I would have opted for an English speaking notaire. As it is, we have to run all of our questions through Agnès, which can be frustrating.
For instance, I wrote her and said, "In the US, after one pays a deposit the buyer hires a licensed inspector to inspect the property and make a report. Do you do something similar?" Her answer was "No, we do not." That was it. No explanation of what they do do.
I asked her on December 28, "Can we arrange for someone to run the water on a regular basis?"
No answer.
I asked again in January, and finally on January 20th, she responded that the seller’s agent was running the water every week. So glad I woke every night for a month picturing rocks of calcium backing up the pipes until they burst and flooded the restaurant downstairs.
We knew that interacting with a foreign system would be hard, and we knew that France was infamous for its red tape, but I think what is so strange is the combination of an excess of paperwork with such an absence of efficiency. It feels like one task is being ticked off every three weeks. At home if you ask a technical question about a contract, a lawyer will answer you within 24 hours. A real estate agent will text an answer to your question from their daughter’s first birthday party.
Of course, this is also why the French think Americans are miserable: we are slaves to our jobs and are always available to clients and customers. You can’t have a society that is focused less on work and more on friends, family, food, and beauty and not suffer a severe lack of customer service. Roberto and I have chosen to live in France for a reason, and we can’t have one without the other.
I’m sure in time, we will slow our rolls and adapt to the leisurely pace of French service. If we can’t, we may have to retire in Germany.
Jusqu’à la prochaine fois (until next time)
Carolyn & Roberto