Selling a house to an English couple

[Teamedup]

Vickybear, I wish you luck with your move back.

Thank you for posting all that.

[allanb]

[quote user="vickybear"]So what happens is the Notaire tells you what tax and fees he requires by completion day and you agree with your buyers a sterling sale price. They pay this to your UK solicitor, or to their UK solicitor to forward on...[/quote]Something I don't understand: if the buyers have already bought the euros forward, as you said earlier, and now they are going to pay sterling to your solicitors, doesn't that mean they have to find the money twice?

Unless they sell the euros for sterling when their forward contract matures - but then they're taking the exchange risk, which I think you were trying to avoid for both sides.

Am I missing something?

[vickybear]

No, you're not missing anything at all!!!

The buyers ( husband ) told us that the money had been forward bought. Then they came back on to say that they would do a sterling transaction but at the rate they could get themselves that day, which was a reasonable rate for us ( only £800 less than we had originally hoped for ).  I have to be absolutely honest and say that when they offered this I chose not to ask too many questions about their forward buying ( actually I didn't ask any!!! ).

I can only think that the deposit had been bought but not the balance. They were doing the French part through an English Traductrice who really wasn't very efficient so there's every chance she hadn't arranged the forward purchase after all.

Either way, we said yes and that's what happened.

For anyone not following all of this, the key is to agree your English price right at the start and before your purchasers start looking around for euros. We got very lucky managing to do this later in the pocess.

( mind you, looking at what happened to the euro by the time we completed there's every chance we could have got more sterling as the rate dropped but what we did get was peace of mind, a definite figure and more importantly a definite date to give to our UK solicitor for the completion of the purchase of our UK house ). If we'd had to exchange the euros we could not have set a definite date and would have been homeless with 4 pets for the time it took to exchange currency and complete the UK purchase.

We sold in France on 28th February, our UK solicitor confirmed he had the funds, he completed our UK purchase the same day and we moved in on 1st March.

If it's possible for you to do this and your circumstances are the same as ours I would recommend it. Not every case is the same.

Hope this all makes sense?