Buying property in Menton from abroad

The difficulty of a remote purchase is never the welcome, it is the sorting: how to choose a property you have not visited, in a town where the gap from one street to the next is real, between a dark courtyard apartment and a bright south-facing floor two steps away. Home Select steers the search from its management, with its network of 15,000 partners, receives more than 100 off-market properties every day and monitors 1,700 listing sites. In Menton, where the fine addresses of Garavan and the Annonciade hills trade privately, watchfulness counts for more than budget, and the right address arrives before the right listing.

Each shortlisted property is qualified on documents: title, diagnostics, minutes of the general meetings, charges, the seller’s situation. Then comes the video pre-viewing, steered by Home Select with the seller’s agent, window by window, at the hours when the light turns, to check the real view, the exposure and the noise of the seafront. The price is set against comparable sales in the DVF survey, and only the properties that deserve your trip stay on the shortlist. Home Select counts 50% expatriate or international clients: this way of working is its routine, not an exception, whether you want to buy a house in Menton or an apartment with a terrace.

Nothing is closed to you: France imposes no nationality or residence condition for buying a property. The rules are the same for everyone, and they protect the buyer. An offer to purchase accompanied by a payment is void: nobody can ask you for a deposit to “hold” a property. After signing the sale agreement, you have a ten-day withdrawal period. The diagnostics, energy rating, asbestos, lead, termites depending on the zone, electricity, gas and risks, are at the seller’s expense and are read before the offer, not after.

On this coast, two more rules. The shore belongs to the public maritime domain: no villa in Garavan owns the sea in front of it. And the loi Littoral protects a hundred-metre strip outside built-up areas, which weighs on any idea of extending a villa in the bay or on the hills. For the taxation of your country of residence, tax treaties and inheritance, your notary and a tax adviser take over: that is another trade, which Home Select does not mix with the search.

Menton lives the other way round from the seaside resorts: winter is its high season, the Fête du citron in February marks its peak, and the wintering clientele that makes the market returns in the mild months. To view and to buy, mid-season remains the best window: the market is active from February to June, then again from September. For a remote buyer, the sequence is prepared in reverse: the brief in autumn, qualification over the winter, a single trip in spring, signing before the summer, or in September.

The pitfalls are those of the buildings and the view. On the seafront, salt air works façades and joinery, and many old buildings have been through heavy façade works: the maintenance log is read before the offer. In the hills, sloping roads are checked and some plots call for a soil survey. Everywhere, exposure plays out street by street: a sheltered slope keeps its citrus trees through the winter, a more open street takes the wind and the damp, and what grows in the neighbouring gardens says more than a listing. Lastly, a view over roofs and gardens is sometimes worth more than a distant sea from the top floor: among the homes for sale in Menton, the video compares the two at the hours when the sun turns.