Buying property in Uzès from abroad

The difficulty of a remote purchase is not the welcome, it is access. The Uzès market is small and closed: owners, notaires and craftsmen know one another, and a fine house in the old centre first circulates between address books, before any listing. Home Select works Uzès remotely, for the buyer’s sole account. Everything starts with a brief: old centre or countryside, floor area, courtyard or garden, tolerance for works, budget.

Home Select then steers the search, led by its management, with a network of 15,000 partners; Home Select receives more than 100 off-market properties every day and monitors 1,700 listing sites, because the homes for sale in Uzès that matter rarely reach the portals. Each shortlisted property is vetted on documents, title, surveys, co-ownership rules or easements, then pre-viewed on video, Home Select steering the visit with the seller’s agent. The price is set against comparable DVF sales in the commune, then come the offer and the negotiation. You travel only for the decisive viewings, grouped into a single trip; Home Select then secures the offer and coordinates the notaire up to completion.

The place aux Herbes and the old centre first: village houses and private mansions with uneven floors, medieval lanes, the life of the market at the door; it is the address everyone wants and almost no one leaves. Then the castle quarter, around the ducal castle and the cathedral with its Fenestrelle tower: 17th- and 18th-century private mansions, staircases, fireplaces, shaded courtyards, where each sale is settled privately. For an owner away part of the year, an apartment in a private mansion is often the simplest to keep there.

Bourrac and the outskirts offer the compromise: simpler houses with a small courtyard, a few minutes’ walk from the square, and good surprises behind unassuming façades. The farmhouses of the Uzège, finally, give the immediate countryside, stone, vines and olive trees; but an estate has to be run, and water, access and outbuildings are checked before the offer. Who buys this way? English-speaking and Dutch buyers, following a community settled long ago, families preparing a move, Parisians who keep a foot in the capital: whoever decides to buy a house in Uzès chooses it for the long term.

The Uzès market works mostly in spring and at the September rentrée. For a remote buyer the sequence is prepared in reverse: brief in winter, pre-viewings in spring, a single trip, an offer before summer or at the rentrée.

The law makes no difference: no nationality or residency condition to buy in France; an offer to purchase accompanied by a payment is void; the buyer has a ten-day withdrawal period after the preliminary contract; the surveys are at the seller’s expense. In the old centre, a site patrimonial remarquable, any façade project requires the agreement of the architecte des Bâtiments de France. The taxation of your country of residence, the holding structure and inheritance fall to your notaire and a tax adviser: another trade, which Home Select does not mix with the search.

Home Select’s fees are due 100% on success, nothing before completion: 2.5% including VAT of the net purchase price for the Exclusive offer, with a minimum of €10,000 including VAT; the Confidentielle offer, 1.5% including VAT of the net purchase price, is reserved for projects of 2 million euros and above, same full service, off-market properties only. Home Select, founded in 2011, has accompanied more than 1,200 buyers, 30% of them expatriates or international.