Financing

There are obviously several ways that you can finance the purchase of a property overseas. Firstly, be re-mortgaging your current home, which of course we can assist with, secondly, paying outright cash for the property, or thirdly raising a mortgage through French bank.

Options 1 and 2 would appear fairly straight forward, and indeed raising a mortgage through a French bank has certain advantages. For example, it means that you don’t use the equity in your existing property which might hinder a domestic move in the United Kingdom, and secondly the interest rates are marginally more attractive (when we fixed our mortgage it was at 3.5%, as opposed to 4.75 in the United Kingdom).

It should however be pointed out that the French banking system is a lot more rigid than the mortgage lending policy that you might find in the United Kingdom, some might say, not a bad idea, however it does mean that there are several hoops to jump through which you will not encounter in the United Kingdom.

In this respect we have a number of local contacts in Nice who are both bi-lingual and friendly towards the English mentality of house buying. For example most French banks will insist that you take out obligatory life cover, whereas the contacts that we have made will allow you to use existing life cover that has been arranged in the United Kingdom. This may represent a saving of several hundred pounds a month.