French bank has bought the property we were buying

[Roy]

Following a long search and after our offer of the full asking price was accepted on a property my wife and I expected to get the compromis to sign fairly quickly. But after a delay of two months the agent told us the French vendor was in serious debt and his bank had to agree to the sale of the property.

Three more months later and the agent has just informed us "Le propriétaire à 2 logements identiques dont 1 que nous avons visité ensemble, les logements viennent d'être rachetés par la banque la BNP au prix de 220 000 € chacun."

220,000 is 50,000 higher than the full asking price that we offered and which was accepted by the vendor's agent. We don't understand why the asking price was not agreed by the bank before the property was put on sale. We are also aggrieved that we were not even asked if we wanted to increase our offer. Our lawyer says sorry but there is nothing that can be done.

Has anyone come.across this situation? We are still interested in buying the property, having so far found nothing else that suits us. How would we go about contacting BNP to see if we could buy the property from them?

[Théière]

Mortgages are secured by a first charge on the properties so BNP would have ownership rights in the case of default which is what this sounds like. A bit hard on you though, as the lawyer must have contact details for the parties concerned surely they could do some chasing for you?

[idun]

I daresay that the BNP would sell you this at the new price, wouldn't they?

What with debt or simply the Mairie being able have first dibs at a property, buying in France can be complicated.

[DraytonBoy]

A similar thing happened to us a few years back. We wanted to buy a house that was mortgaged way beyond it's current value. I offered to pay the full asking price but the bank (Caisse D'Epargne) insisted it went to auction so we looked for something else. It ended up being sold for 50k below what we were willing to pay.