Personal Update: We Found Our New Home with Luck & Timing

Our new home, today. Ruckus the cat approves.

Before I jump into this wild story of how we finally found and successfully purchased our new home after selling our 1st home in Biarritz, I have briefly recapped our story so far in the first 2 paragraphs below.

Timing for Listing & Selling our 1st Home

We decided to list our home in October of 2020 after seeing the market go wild, with buyers purchasing homes outside of large cities and near natural spaces because of COVID. Despite having another confinement period between November and January, we managed to find a buyer at the end of January and our home was finally under contract by March. We began eagerly searching for something to buy; be it a fixer upper, renovated, architect’s house, and we even looked into purchasing land to build a home! At this point, the looming deadline to be out of our 1st home by May 20th was a lot of pressure on us.

Searching & Not Finding

Having looked at multiple homes and having made offers on two of them to no avail, our morale was running super low. We were scared that we had done something not very smart in selling our first love, close to the ocean and with Summer time approaching. If you know Biarritz in Summer, then you would know our fear of not having anywhere to go after leaving our home if we did not find something ASAP. I won’t sugarcoat it. It was stressful and at times I doubted the decision we had made to sell our home.

Change of Luck

Alex and I get contacted regularly from the Live in Biarritz website by expats dreaming of making a life in Biarritz and we love to help them. There was one particular client who was a fellow American and pressed to find a home and settle into life in Biarritz who Alex had shown multiple homes, but he finally found a home with another agency in town. He kept in touch with Alex, keeping him in he know about how things were progressing with the home he was in the middle of purchasing. One day in late February, Alex received a call from this same client who now sought Alex’s guidance on how to break the contract of buying the home in which he had already signed the “compromis de vente.” Alex told him that the deposit he put down would be lost if he backed out now but that he would take a look at the contract to see if there were any other options for the client to get his deposit money back.

As it turns out, there was a clause of substitution in the contract which read that if the buyer found someone or a company who wished to be substituted for the exact same conditions, then the new buyer would sign a new compromis de vente and put their deposit down and at the end of the sale, the original buyer could receive their money back. Alex explained all of this to this client and knowing pretty much every home on the market at that time, I interjected and asked exactly which home had he been in the process of buying. It was a home I had my eyes on back in December and we hadn’t been at the point to start making offers, and additionally the house had sold in 1 day! This home was not only impeccable, it bordered the only forest in Biarritz.

So, we began to have the American client entertain the idea that we could be substituted as buyers and that he would receive all his deposit money back at the end of the sale. Over a month or so, it was a struggle. Lots of pieces had to fall into place and we had to be ok with making the same full price offer with zero conditions even though we needed a mortgage.

When the First Dice Roll Isn’t Risky Enough, Roll Twice

With the compromis de vente signed on our 1st home, we felt fairly comfortable in making offers and in securing a mortgage with our current bank, as we had already spoken to the director of the bank and gave us a rough estimate of how much they would be able to loan us. What we didn’t expect was that what was said to us and what would happen in reality would be two very different things. After we had agreed to be substituted in the buying of the home, we discovered that our bank would not be loaning us what they had agreed upon verbally and we were suddenly in a panic to find a bank who would give us a home loan.

Through Alex’s network, we were able to get in touch with a friend of a colleague who worked for a bank for 25 years and now is a mortgage broker. Not only was he able to get us a home loan in record time, he walked us through every piece of paper we needed to submit to make the loan happen. He was hyper-reactive and I’m convinced that everything would have fallen through if it weren’t for this man’s expertise and connections.

We signed for the sale of our 1st home on May 20th and stayed at an Airbnb in town for 3 weeks before signing the “acte de vente” on our new home on June 10th. In those 3 weeks, everyone had to be on their games in order to make the signing happen on time. We had chosen our original notaire’s office we purchased our 1st home through, but decided to run this process through one of his partners who speaks English and is just as diligent as him. I cannot stress enough the importance of having all the right people working on this project in order to make it happen. The right notaire, the right mortgage broker, the right bank, and the right amount of initiative from us as well.

By the ‘Skin of Our Teeth’

Finally, June 10th came and it was time to sign the “acte de vente” and get the keys to our new paradise! Our mortgage was only granted to us 2 days before the signing, there was something specific that could have pushed the signing out another 2-4 weeks that was signed the hour before our signing, but WE DID IT! That day of moving in was one of the sweetest successes we had ever tasted. Finally, we could make our nest and settle into our paradise.

In conclusion, we experienced first hand that this market in Biarritz at the moment is much more complex and difficult to make deals happen——-but it’s not impossible. So what does it take to get your dream home in Biarritz? A whole lot of due diligence, hyper-reactivity, financing/cash, and more than a sprinkle of luck. This process we went through was not for the faint of heart but I say to you today, whole-heartedly, even through all the stress and painful times it was worth it.