We bought a Château!

379 days

Even Saint Monica the patron saint of patience would have had hers tested.

If there was a legal problem that had to be solved in buying a property in France, this one seemed to have them all. Whether it was succession, rights of preemption, seeking institutional permissions, agricultural land and vine rules, being a foreign farmer, rights to exploit the land, trademarks, transfer of stock, tax declarations, finding farm equipment that had been borrowed, settling with previous employees, visas and business plans, company set-ups, banking and financial compliance, criminal records checks, disjointed and unknown processes (even by the owners of said processes), August (need I say more!) and notorious bureaucracy, we lurched from one hurdle to the next.

The original timeline had us completing in March!

So finally after 1 year and 14 days since we put our offer in, we finally signed on the dotted line.

Team effort

From our first scouting trips and looking at multiple châteaux and farmhouses, to our finding this magnificent house on the hillside, Beaux Villages Immobilier and the team of Owen, Carole and Marion have been rooting for us the whole way.

Add in multiple notaires and solicitors, tax advisors, farming specialists and accountants and this has felt like a heavy-lifting exercise, sadly at times feeling like we might be the first people ever to try and buy a château!

But we got there in the end. The actual bureaucracy didn't turn out to be as bad as its' infamous reputation and everyone worked hard on getting our purchase to a conclusion eventually. Fundamentally it was a complicated purchase, with a lot a serial processes and dependencies which just added time, and 424 pages to final dossier!

So for perseverance and tenacity, maximum 10 points to us, but also to each and every one of the team that helped us along the way...with our thanks. I suspect you are just as relieved as we are that it is over the line now!

I'll also add a big thank you to the sellers, particularly Sam who, based in the US must have been tearing his hair out throughout a much longer timeframe to sell off all the property and assets accumulated by his parents. Thank you for being so accommodating for our visits, and we look forward to renewing and building on the legacy that his family created at the château since the 1980s.

Now the adventure really begins.