Les Lamas de l'Aubaine

Rather bizarrely, we now own no houses at all.

On Wednesday, we collected the cheque from the notaire for the sale of our house at Roquetaillade. Another idiosyncratic transaction, which reminded me how likeable and yet how irritating Maitre Isard can be. He’s a lovely example of the charms and frustrations of old fashioned French bureaucracy. As we parted with yet another warm handshake, I reflected that I shall miss my interactions with this strangely appealing man.

And then on Thursday, announced only by a very brief email from our solicitor, the house sale in Derby completed. Hugely more efficient that Maitre Isard, the enormous Newcastle firm were represented by small cogs who dealt pleasantly with us by email. In the whole process, I never spoke to any of them, let alone met them face-to-face. And yet, the money arrived very rapidly by instant electronic transfer into our English bank account.

Both house sales have been stressful. And yet they have ended in rather unsatisfying anti-climaxes. The systems in England and in France are very different, and it’s clear that each could be improved by borrowing from the other.

I’d like a combination which brought together the good points of both countries:

• The French legal approach is based around the work of the notaire, whose roles are to represent the government in collecting taxes, while ensuring that the legal work is all done, and making sure that both buyers and sellers understand what they are doing. This is so much better than the adversarial system of separate solicitors in England. The buyers’ solicitors in particular seem to feel they have to justify their position by asking lots of pretty trivial questions, to which the sellers’ solicitors respond as minimally and unhelpfully as possible. The whole process appears to have little chance of clarifying issues for buyers, while in France any problems would be resolved round the table at the notaire’s – with the lawyer’s role being to ensure clarity and fair play.
• The French system of signing a binding contract very early in the process, and only then working through the details and the legal work, is massively less stressful. It means that both buyer and seller know that the sale will definitely happen, even though the date is uncertain. It still allows for either party to build in clauses that protect their position – for example by saying that the contract is dependent on agreeing a right of access to part of the property (an issue which arose in both our sales). The worst aspect of the English process, at least from our perspective, was that we could not be sure that we actually had sold the house until literally the day before the sale was completed.
• The English system is very convenient. We didn’t have to make multiple trips to the lawyer’s office, to sign and initial all the pages of many documents. Everything could be done by email and occasionally by post. Indeed, we could complete the transaction entirely from another country.
• The English have largely embraced the internet and electronic documents. Several times, we were able to bounce annotated plans and other documents backwards and forwards between all concerned. The legal processes have been made possible electronically. And electronic transfers of money between the parties are routinely completed without delay – no long waits for handwritten cheques that we walk round to the bank, like in France.

I suspect that the French system will be modernised in its operation in a year or two, and will thus gain all the advantages I think that the English system has. It will, however, not lose its paternalistic control by the notaire. I think the French are wise to keep this – even in the hands of a charming bumbler like Maitre Isard, it was reassuringly and thoroughly even-handed.

Estate agents seem to me to be the appalling weak point of the system in both countries. More bitter and bile-soaked comment about this parasitical role in due course, perhaps when we have actually bought the new house to get on with our llama life. I’m really, really looking forward to that. Unfortunately, first we have to get through the multiple horrors of transporting the animate and inanimate components of said life about 500 km in a northerly direction. . . .