Our notaire didn’t provide a translator. To be fair, we didn’t ask her to - in part because we knew she had a clerk who spoke excellent English and expected her to be present, but she wasn’t. All was not lost, however, our French was *nearly* up to the task and, as it happens, our vendors were multilingual (she a professional translator). Of course, that supposes one would be happy to trust the “other side” with the translation - we were. Still - if your french is not so hot you might want to *check* the notaire is planning to provide a translator and ask.

It’s worth mentioning that one of the notaire’s jobs is to read the *entire* contract to you section by section and make sure you’ve understood it. (It’s also not too late for minor changes if you spot an error - or such was our experience). You’ll all (vendor/vendors and buyer/buyers) be asked to sign every page!

The contract will include ful details of any morgage you’ve taken out to buy the property - there’s no separate morgage contract in France. So your vendors will see this. Also if you’ve made any agreement for separate purchase of furniture, say, this will be detailed in the contract.

Finally, as yousaid, the completion was a bit vague. We knew we owned the house from Date X. We had the keys. But the vendors had not yet had the marie sign-off on some work they had completed, and it turned out this had not been done in accordance with the plan. It was clear they were expected to finish the work to the happiness of the marie (which, in the end, involved submitting a fresh plan that showed what they HAD actually built then makign some minor adjustments to that to match the newly approved plan - all took about six months and the vendor was happy to comply. What would the situation have been if the vendor had refused, or simply failed to get it done, I know not.

Still, whilst different from our own system, the whole thing was fairly straightfoward, the most significant practical difference is that it takes SOOOO long and there’s so much still done with paper and ink on freshly drawn up documents! If you’ve still got that brief case your nan gave you under the desk never been used, this might be a good time to dust it off!

Remember that notaires only get paid provided the sale goes ahead! Some can be tempted to let their impartiality slip through… Besides, where a conflict of interests arises, having one notaire acting for both sides can lead to serious difficulties.