There's Asbestos Where?
Our purchase moves forward.
After several mishaps Roberto and I managed to sign the final Offer D’Achat (Purchase Offer) on the Montpellier apartment on December 15, 2022. Within the contract was this sentence: A preliminary sales contract must then be signed by the OWNER and the OFFEROR no later than January 15, 2023. We understood this to mean that the next contract, the Compromis de Vente (the Purchase Agreement) had to be signed within the month or the purchase offer would become void. Fine by us. We were happy for things to happen quickly.
However, we didn’t hear from the notaire until December 28th, when we got a list of questions from her. We were excited to receive the email. Having the notaire on board is like getting a title company involved, and now things could move forward. One question the notaire asked was whether or not we were married and, if yes, she needed proof.
She wanted a copy of our marriage certificate. I tore apart the house searching for it, only for Roberto to remember (God bless him) that I had glued it into the back of our wedding photo album so that we would ALWAYS KNOW WHERE IT WAS.
We also had to sign an "absence of loan" document that was a declaration that by not getting a loan with a French bank we were forfeiting the protection that came with that loan. We signed it and several days later were informed we had done it incorrectly—we needed to copy out the whole declaration by hand, word for word, and then sign it. So we printed it out again and signed it again (you will probably sense a theme here).
Within all the emails with our agent and the notaire, there was a lot of talk about random fees that made us nervous. Roberto asked for a definitive list of what we would have to pay by the end of the purchase, and the notaire eventually sent us this:
The purchase price (on which a deposit of 20,000.00 euros would be paid when we signed the Purchase Agreement).
Real estate agency commission payable by us = 10,000.00 euros (this was included in the listing price).
Authentic deed of sale costs = approximately 29,000.00 euros (this is the cost of the notaire plus the one time purchase tax you are paying to the French government. The tax is a variable rate.)
Proxies signing fee = 60.00 euros per proxy (this is the power of attorney fee for signing the Purchase Agreement. We will be there in person to sign at closing).
Translator fees = 870.00 euros (translating contracts for the government seems to be a very lucrative, if tedious, career).
Costs of the promise of sale = 400.00 euros (no freakin clue what this is for).
On January 11 we received a contract for the translator, signed it, and sent it back. No one told us to do it again! Victory! (Although it did sit in our agent’s spam folder for three days. God forbid it was a seamless transaction).
January 15, which we thought was a very important deadline for signing the Purchase Agreement, came and went. No one on the French side seemed to care. At the end of the month, we each used Docusign to sign the "Power of Attorney for purchase." There was a "technical problem" and we had to sign the documents again. Bien sur.
On February 8th everyone on the French teams assembled in Montpellier—our agent, the seller, the seller’s agent, the notaire, and our proxy. The seller and our proxy signed the Purchase Agreement. I imagine they did this over champagne and a cheese plate because France.
The notaire then sent us the signed contract, which was a 287 page document in both English and French that included the identification of the property, a list of existing damage or liens, rental laws, and results from an inspection (property inspections in France are carried out by a government official and arranged by the seller.)
We scrolled through the inspection and happily read that there was no dry rot, no termites, no lead problem. But we stopped short at this sentence: As part of the mission, materials and products were identified containing asbestos.
Uh. Whu?
As an architect working in NYC, Roberto had come across asbestos on almost every project he’d worked on. He wasn’t panicked (so glad one of us wasn’t). He explained that asbestos is dangerous, but it isn’t like radiation; it won’t come through the walls to get you. Generally there are two strategies when you find asbestos in an old building:
Removal or abatement: Typically done by licensed professionals wearing special suits and masks. The whole area of work is enclosed, the ACM (asbestos containing material) is bagged and taken to a controlled disposal facility.
Encapsulation: This is actually the safer strategy. The ACM is enclosed with some other material to prevent it from releasing dangerous fibers into the surrounding air. An example of this that Roberto ran across frequently was finding old floor tile or tile mastic that contained asbestos. The old flooring was typically encapsulated with a layer of concrete before a new floor was laid down.
Our inspection indicated that the type and location of the asbestos that was found had been detailed in a report, but the report was not in the contract we’d received.
Roberto wrote to our agent, Agnès, and asked for a copy. She furnished it quickly. Asbestos had been found in the area that was now a storage/utility closet, right beside the entry door. The report didn’t say what the material was, but noted that the asbestos had been encapsulated.
Roberto’s guess is that there was either an old pipe with asbestos insulation around it, or they found asbestos in the mastic/mortar used for old floor tiles. He wasn’t concerned and seeing the record of all the paperwork and reports left him feeling confident that the situation had been managed properly and risks had been appropriately mitigated.
The report went on to explain that we were required by law to provide notice of the asbestos to anyone working on our apartment in the future and to any future buyers. “Good for France!” said Roberto. “That should be the requirement.”
Asbestos crisis averted, we now moved on to the next task: sending the deposit. We were told we had until February 17th (nine days away) to send the money in euros. No problem, right? I’d had months to figure out the best way to do this. And I was SO smart. I’d opened an international account with HSBC so that the wire transfer would be seamless. They also have branches in France so having the international account would make it easier to open a local Montpellier account when we were ready.
I was elated to finally fill out the form for the wire transfer and hit send. But then . . . nothing happened. I got a message saying “Please try again later.” I tried again later and got the same message. This happened over and over until I was sure HSBC stood for “Has Shit for Brains Central.”
I called their customer service and spoke with an employee who also had no clue what the problem was. I was doing everything correctly. After a full hour, he said, “I think I am going to have write a ticket about this case!” He said this as if he were a coroner who had just discovered that the deceased had not died of an aneurysm but a lion attack. I was unimpressed and nonplussed. (One month later and HSBC has still not solved this grand mystery, but they assure me they are hot on the case. I’ll keep you posted because I know you are on the edge of your seats.)
I ended up using my Schwab account which worked fine but the money took nearly two weeks to show up in the notaire’s French bank account. I tell you this story mostly as an example of “I thought I was being so clever and forward thinking and instead I wasted a ton of my time and energy on something I could have done all along with the tools I already had.” Anyone who has ever bought a pod coffee machine will know exactly what I mean.
This story has a happy ending. After signing and resigning all the papers and sending and resending the money, we have a closing date! We will be returning to Montpellier in mid April to take possession of our new apartment. Mon dieu and hot damn.
We’d love to hear your own property purchase snags and headaches in the comments.
Jusqu’à la prochaine fois (until next time),
Carolyn & Roberto