Has anyone ever bought or sold a house in France with £'s?

propertyrich_cashpoor

My parents live in France and they're trying to sell their house and move back to the UK. They found a English buyer, accepted an offer and it was all going ahead merrily until the £ collapsed with the coronavirus. !!!!!!. The buyer is still super keen to buy the house but they can't afford it with the new exchange rate and my parents can't afford to drop the price. As my parents are moving back to the UK it seems crazy for the buyer to have to move the £'s to euros and then my parents move it back from euros to £'s the next day. We've found a house in the UK we're desperate to buy so I'm wondering if it's legal and possible for the sale to be done in £'s so no money has to be exchanged. Obviously the estate agents fees and the Notaires (French solicitors fees) have to be in Euros but is there a way we could still possible make this work??
Any help would be massively appreciated please. thank you!  

AdrianC

Of course you can. Just find a notaire that's happy with the idea.

eddddy

I'm not sure that would work. 

In France, I believe that the standard process is that, on completion day,  the buyer pays the purchase money into the notaire's account, the keys are handed over, then the notaire transfers the money into the seller's account.

And it's unlikely that the notaire would have a GBP account, only an EUR account.

In theory, I guess the buyer and seller could agree to set up some kind of 'escrow' account with a UK solicitor - i.e, the buyer pays the solicitor the purchase money before completion. Then the solicitor checks that completion has happened, and then pays the money to the seller. But I've never come across anyone who's done that, and I don't know if a solicitor would agree to do that.

davidmcn

I expect any UK solicitors would have money-laundering concerns about doing purely the monetary transfer for a foreign transaction.

The other option would be for the parties to trust each other sufficiently that they can transfer the funds directly without involving lawyers, though I'm guessing it's an arm's length transaction and that's unlikely to be a desirable way forward.

knightstyle

As eddddy said, we have bought and sold several properties in France to brits and French buyers and it has always had to be in Euros paid in advance into the notaires account. 
Use a company like currencies direct to move the money to and from the UK.

bigmortgage

propertyrich_cashpoor said:

My parents live in France and they're trying to sell their house and move back to the UK. They found a English buyer, accepted an offer and it was all going ahead merrily until the £ collapsed with the coronavirus. !!!!!!  

In France you sign (essentially exchange contracts) with your respective notaires at the beginning of a 3 month period. That sets the agreed price in Euros and other than certain circumstances (coronavirus not being one of them) you are not allowed to pull out. In many ways a much better system than the UK where you faf for 3 months and exchange at the end, allowing all the work to potentially be wasted at the whim of one of the parties.

If it was all going ahead merilly then I assume a compromis was signed and the price in Euros is set, making the exchange rate irrelevant and firmly the buyers problem. If a compromis was not signed then I would say it was far from going ahead merrily with well over 3 months left before any sale completed.

You can't sell in GBP, closest would be a gentlemans agreement (or escrow as mentioned above) with the buyers that whatever the exchange rate does X amount would be paid in GBP.