The French buying process is slower than many people are used to and considerably safer. The uncertainty sits at the front rather than the back: you commit early, and once you have committed, almost nothing can go wrong.
There is no gazumping in France. There is no chain collapsing the week before you move. What there is instead is a binding contract signed near the beginning, a notaire who is a public officer rather than anyone's hired champion, and a set of statutory protections that exist whether or not you ask for them.
Here is the whole thing in order.
First, understand what a notaire is
Almost every misunderstanding about buying in France comes from assuming the notaire is the French version of a conveyancing solicitor. They are not.
A notaire is a public officer appointed by the state. They draw up the deed, they carry out the searches, they collect the taxes on the government's behalf and they hold the money. Their duty of advice runs to both parties, not to whoever is paying them.
One notaire can perfectly well act for both buyer and seller, and most sales work that way. If you would rather have your own, you can appoint one at no extra cost — the fee is fixed by the state and the two notaires divide it between them. Many foreign buyers prefer to do that, and there is no reason not to.
What a notaire will not do is negotiate for you or tell you whether the price is sensible. That is not their job.
Step one: the offer
You make an offre d'achat, normally in writing and usually through the agent. It states the price and how long it stands.
Two things to know. You may withdraw an offer at any point before the seller accepts it. And once the seller does accept in writing, you are in principle committed — which in practice simply means the parties move straight on to the compromis.
Do not sign an offer at the full asking price casually, and do not make offers on three houses at once to see which sticks.
Step two: the compromis de vente
This is the real contract, and it is where French practice differs most from what people expect.
A compromis de vente binds both sides. The seller must sell and the buyer must buy, subject to the conditions written into it. The property comes off the market.
There is an alternative, the promesse unilatérale de vente, where only the seller is bound and the buyer holds an option for an agreed period, having paid a sum to hold it. It is more common in some regions and on some transactions. For most purchases you will be signing a compromis.
It can be signed at the notaire's office or at the agency. Signing at the notaire is better, and it costs no more.
The compromis sets the price, the parties, the property, the completion date, the deposit, the conditions and the penalty if someone walks away without a good reason. Read the completion date carefully — it is typically two to three months out, and everything else runs from it.
The deposit
You pay a dépôt de garantie, generally five to ten per cent of the price. It is held by the notaire or the agent in a protected account, not handed to the seller, and it comes off the price at completion.
The amount is negotiable. A buyer with cash and no loan condition can often agree three per cent, occasionally nothing at all.
If you walk away for a reason the contract allows, you get it back in full. If you walk away for no reason after the cooling-off period, you can lose it.
The ten days — your single best protection
Once the signed compromis has been formally notified to you, you have ten days in which to pull out for any reason at all, or for none, with no penalty and your deposit returned in full.
The detail matters, so here it is precisely. The right belongs to the buyer only — a private buyer, not a professional. The seller has no equivalent and is bound from signature. The ten days run from the day after the signed contract is first properly delivered to you, which means by registered post with acknowledgement of receipt, by hand against a signed receipt, or by a qualified secure electronic route. If the tenth day falls on a weekend or a public holiday, it moves to the next working day.
That first proper delivery is the thing people get wrong. The clock does not start when you sign, and it does not start when a scan arrives by email. It starts from the formal notification.
Use the ten days. Walk the boundaries again, go back at a different hour, read the planning documents, and if something is wrong, say so and withdraw. It is free.
The conditions suspensives
These are the conditions that must be met for the sale to go through, and if one fails the contract falls away and your deposit comes back.
The loan condition is the important one. If you are borrowing, the compromis must state the amount, the maximum rate and term, and a deadline for obtaining the offer. The law sets a minimum period of one month; in practice it is usually forty-five to sixty days. If you are genuinely refused — and you must be able to show you applied properly — the sale is cancelled and you are repaid.
If you are not borrowing, the law requires you to say so by writing a specific declaration in your own hand. Think before you do. Waiving the loan condition when there is any chance you will need finance removes your safety net entirely.
Other conditions commonly included: that the commune does not exercise its right of pre-emption, that the searches throw up no charge or servitude that was not disclosed, that any planning permission relied on is granted, and on rural land that SAFER, the agricultural land body, does not step in.
You can ask for your own conditions as well. If the sale only makes sense to you with planning permission for an extension, or subject to a structural survey, say so before signing rather than after.
What happens in the gap
The two or three months between compromis and completion look like nothing is happening. A great deal is.
The notaire obtains the urbanism certificate from the mairie, showing what the property is, what the zoning allows and what constraints apply. They notify the commune of the sale, and the commune has two months to decide whether to exercise its right of pre-emption — a right it almost never uses, but which has to be cleared. They check the title back through previous owners, look for mortgages, charges, rights of way and boundary disputes, and settle who pays which part of the taxes for the year.
Meanwhile the seller must supply the diagnostics. For an existing house this is a substantial file: the energy rating, asbestos if built before 1997, lead if before 1949, termites in affected zones, the state of the gas and electrical installations if they are over fifteen years old, the septic tank report if there is no mains drainage, and the risks statement covering flood, subsidence, radon and seismic zones.
Read the diagnostics properly. They are the single most useful document in the file and they are the reason a cheap old house often turns out not to be cheap.
Your job in this period is to arrange your money. A French notaire will not complete until the full amount is in their account, cleared. Transfers from abroad take longer than people expect and exchange rates move, so start early and allow for both.
Step three: the acte authentique
Completion happens at the notaire's office. The deed is read aloud — genuinely, in full, in French — and then signed.
If your French is not up to following it, the notaire will usually require an interpreter, and in any case you should have had the document explained to you beforehand. Do not sign anything you have not understood.
The balance of the money must already be with the notaire, and that includes their fees and the taxes, which are collected at the same time.
You get the keys on the day. The formal copy of the deed, the titre de propriété, follows some months later once it has been registered; what you receive at the table is an attestation, which is enough for the utilities and the insurance.
If you cannot be there
You do not have to attend. A procuration, a power of attorney, lets the notaire's office or someone you nominate sign on your behalf. It is drawn up in advance and signed in front of a notaire, or at a consulate, or before a notary at home with the right legalisation.
Thousands of foreign buyers complete this way every year. Arrange it early, not in the last fortnight.
The fees
The costs people call frais de notaire are mostly not the notaire's fee at all — the bulk is tax collected for the state. On an existing property they come to roughly seven to eight per cent of the price. On a new build they are far lower, because a new property is taxed differently.
We have a separate article on notaire fees setting out what the money actually is.
Buying a plot and building: a different route
If you are buying land and having a house built, the process splits in two, and both halves are simpler and better protected than buying second-hand.
The land is bought with an ordinary compromis and acte, exactly as above, with the same ten days and the same conditions — plus one more that matters enormously: the sale is normally conditional on the building permit being granted. If the permit is refused, you do not buy the land.
The house is then built under a CCMI, the construction contract that French law reserves for building a single house on your own land. It is the most protective building contract in Europe. The price is fixed and cannot be revised outside the terms written in. The delivery date is contractual with penalties for lateness. Payments are staged against work actually completed, to percentages set by law. The builder must hold a garantie de livraison, an insurance-backed guarantee that if they fail the house is still finished at the agreed price. And the structure carries a ten-year guarantee regardless of who owns it afterwards.
The CCMI has its own ten-day cooling-off period, separate from the land purchase.
There are no diagnostics to worry about because there is nothing yet to diagnose, no survey needed, no hidden damp, no asbestos, no rewiring, and no argument about what the previous owner did without permission.
The timeline in one place
An offer, accepted. A compromis a week or two later. Ten days to change your mind. Then two to three months of searches, pre-emption clearance and loan arrangements, and completion at the notaire's office.
Call it three to four months from handshake to keys for an existing house. For a plot and a new build, the land follows the same path while the permit is applied for, and the build runs from there.
The whole structure is designed so that the moment of risk is short and early, and everything after it is administration. Once your ten days are up and your conditions are in place, French purchases very rarely fall apart.
We build across Brittany, Normandy and the Vendée, every house on a fixed inclusive price with the notaire's fees inside the figure we quote and the ten-year guarantee behind it. If you want the process walked through for a specific plot before you commit to anything, that is exactly what the first call is for. Book a free half-hour, or reach us on WhatsApp or by email for a same-day reply. You can also see what each of our plots comes to, all in, with the build cost calculator.