I pinched that headline from the Sunday Times today – (I have no qualms as they pinched mine on the next page “Once more unto the Beach” ) . It is an interesting story about a conflict in the sale of a property in 1999.
Briefly, the person occupying the property for the last seven years thought they had bought it, but another buyer on the same day had registered a purchase through another agent and with another Notaire and, it has been judged, had prior legal claim to the purchase. It has taken seven years to sort this out and the present occupier has to leave and will get back the money when they purchased, so it seems a fair conclusion, or is it ?
There is obvously a lot more to this story than can be reported in the papers, clearly the present aggrieved occupant knew about the potential problems seven years ago so I find it hard to sympathise if money has been invested in renovations on a disputed property. From what I can read the agents and Notaire have acted honestly and correctly, the problem seems to have been caused by the agreement between the owners and the estate agents acting for them.
When a property is offered for sale through an estate agent in France there is a contract between the agency and the owner called a “Mandat”. This is usually a non exclusive contract and the owner can appoint as many agencies as they wish to act to sell on their behalf. This is the point, the agent can accept an offer at the contracted (mandated) price on behalf of the owner.
So if an agent gets an offer at the price on the mandat, then if the terms of the sale are met, price, deposit etc, then the agent can register the sale with a Notaire and the deal is done.
It seems that this is what happened in this case. One agent found a buyer, got the contract to purchase signed (compromis de vente) and the deposit paid to a Notaire – while on the same date another agent thought that they were concluding a sale with the sellers and another buyer.
Whatever the details of the case are, the court has judged which “buyer” in fact owns the property and my experience is to agree with the comment made by Mme Gilles, the agent who worked with the successful buyer “The French law is very good and very clear”.
The reason for the confusion and waste of time and money is the fact that most owners will give a contract to sell their property to several estate agents, whilst also retaining the right to sell their property direct if they themselves can attract a buyer. This has many affects on the marketing of a property. If you look at most advertisments, estate agents rarely will give the address of a property, not even which town or village it is in or a decent photo of the front – this is to prevent someone seeing their webpage or advert finding the property, knocking on the door and dealing directly with the owner therby cutting out the agent and their commission.
I have written about this in other blogs and also the “bon de visite” asked for by some agents – my feeling is that when there is an effective Internet service to offer owners an efficient way of marketing their own properties, then agents will have to sit up and really earn their commissions by good effective marketing.