Email to a friend | Read later | Your comments
Thursday, 10th June 2004

'They couldn't have made it more difficult if I had asked for Martian Maundy money'


The story so far... After finding their potential dream home in Normandy and arranging for a builder to give it "the once-over" before committing themselves, Peter Clayton and his wife put in a low offer to the vendors and were shocked and nervously excited to have it accepted...

Arrangements were made to visit the notaire's office near Cherbourg to sign the Compromis de Vente - the agreement-to-purchase contract and the first of two legally binding documents.

So that we would have some idea what we would be signing, I asked for the draft document to be emailed so that I could get it translated by a friend who earned a living by giving business people crash courses in French. The closely typed, 11-page document duly arrived and was swiftly forwarded to our willing friend.

Advertisement your story continues below

Because of the legal terminology contained within the document, even she struggled with one or two caveats and sub-clauses. But we were reassured that there was no obvious mention of the neighbouring farmer having the right to winter his cattle in our future bathroom, and that, to the best knowledge of the vendor and the notaire, there was neither a lead mine nor an asbestos dump in the immediate vicinity of the property.

Our hard-working translator - now with a wider than ever vocabulary - was inadequately rewarded with a case of vin de pays and some headache tablets...

I should have kept back some of those tablets to help me cope with persuading the bank that the foreign draft that I urgently needed as the 10 per cent deposit, really wasn't an out-of-the-ordinary request in this day and age.

I had left it too late to register with a specialist currency broker for this initial chunk of cash, so, perhaps naively, I went into my local branch expecting to come out a few minutes later with a draft for several thousand euros. They couldn't have made it any more difficult if I had asked for Martian Maundy money.

The request had to go to the London office who then sent it to the overseas division and, with about three hours to spare before leaving for Portsmouth docks, it arrived in second class post. Not only did the bank give me several sleepless nights and a particularly lousy exchange rate, they also charged me more than £20 for the bungling mess they had made of such a simple transaction.

However, we were relieved to have the euro draft to take with us to the signing ceremony...it was just fingernails that we were sadly lacking...

Our meeting was scheduled for 11am on the Tuesday, and we sailed out of Portsmouth on Saturday night to allow time for us to acclimatise to French residency.

The ceremony itself was something of an anti-climax. My wife and I, together with the vendor - a dear old chap in his seventies - sat in front of the notaire's large desk and had everything in the document explained to us....twice. Once in French and then in picturesque but understandable English.

We each had to sign every page to indicate our total understanding and acceptance, and then we handed the bank draft over to the notaire. The deal was now done and, apart from a few days' cooling off period and a very few exceptional circumstances, if either party now backed out, a forfeit of 10 per cent of the asking price would have to be paid. We now had about 12 weeks for the final documentation to be drawn up before finally acquiring the keys to our "Normandy gem"...

View comments (2 comments. Last comment 19/06/2004 at 07:48)