203 Just before we sign the compromesso....

Just before we sign the compromesso......

Has anyone had experience of selling a UK property to buy in Italy? We are hoping to buy in the Langhe and have found an excellent property, but we need to release funds from the sale of our house in UK before completing. We have enough funds for deposit, and have a buyer for UK property.

We are feeling cautious about the time between compromesso and final contract, just in case (we have all been there....) there is a major delay in the UK chain etc. We are considering trying to agree a clause in the compromesso tying in the final contract with UK completion but know that this is highly unusual, but wondered if readers could post their experiences of the realistic time between the two events.

On another note, we are slightly suspicious about the health of the vendor. What happens if the vendor dies between compromesso and final contract? Not very delicately asked I know, but perhaps someone out there has experience of this....

Category
Property Sales/Rental Advice

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 04/13/2005 - 02:45

Hi Tim,

we were in a very similar situation to you when we bought our Italian house.

We had our UK house on the market (at a time that was still apparently booming) and had found our house in Italy and wanted to do the deal. We paid the deposit and set a five month delay until the "atto" thinking we would sell easily.

I would love to say that in the meantime we sold our house and all was well but that did not happen. We managed to delay the atto by a month again and finally signed in mid-December having remortgaged (interest only as we knew we were selling). We did not sell our house until the following July after 14 months on the market. Utter hell and I am NEVER selling again. Mind you, I said that last time...

ALso, the very nice lady we bought from was 86 and that "indelicate" question also crossed our lips. We were told it would be a problem and we would have to hope the daughters would also sell to us. They live long in Marche so we took the chance :o

:mad: 1. It was very stressful arranging mortgages and changing deadlines
2. Cost us money in extra mortgage and we dropped the house price
and the exchange rate turned against us.

:D 1. We got the house we wanted
2. It saved us money too as the houses in Italy were going up and
had we bought when we got here, we could not have afforded
what we have.
3. It probably forced us to drop our UK house price and therefore
actually get here. Otherwise we would have hung on and on for
more money and still be in the UK.

So would we do it again? I would try not to but ultimately, yes I would do it again. It is of course a gamble and we were lucky that we had a lot of equity in our house and could pay for the Italian one out of the remortgage.

If you do decide to go down this route, I have only one piece of advice.......

.......try not to worry as much as we did - life's too short! Good Luck

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 04/13/2005 - 12:45

We sold in the Uk first then came out and rented while we looked for our dream house.
It was definitely the best thing we did as our original sale in the UK fell through at the very last minute. What a stressful situation we would have had to cope with if we had alraeady found our Italian home. Also we were in a great position when we eventually came out to purchase as cash buyers! Anyway do not worry take the Italian attitude to life.....Good luck with everything though.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 04/14/2005 - 03:58

The issue regarding the sale of your UK property is more straightforward in that you can insert a conditional clause into the preliminary contract (which is the final contract) stipulating that the purchase is conditional upon you selling your property, and that the contract will not be effective in the event you are unable to sell.

Health of the vendor: This is much more complicated and I would suggest you seek the proper legal advice as this concerns successione or inheritance. You need to establish who stands to inherit the property from the vendor in the event of death. In Italy, there are automatic rights for certain groups of people. Moreover, they can either exercise or give those rights. This very much depends on how the will has been structured.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 04/15/2005 - 16:26

I had a case last year where a compromesso was signed with an 83-year old lady. The completion was foreseen 3 months thereafter only she passed away in the meantime! In this particular case, she had willed her estate to a nephew who was obliged by law to complete the sale. It took about 2 months for the will to be published and another month for it to be potentially contested. All in all, the completion happened with a 5 month delay (with August in the middle).
Lesson learned .... get the completion date fixed asap after the compromesso if there are no apparent "issues" with the property. 3 months is VERY risky when you buy from eldery people. On top of that, they generally go through traumatic change which makes matters worse!

David
[url]www.ourtoscana.com[/url]

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 06/12/2005 - 02:52

[QUOTE=David]I had a case last year where a compromesso was signed with an 83-year old lady. The completion was foreseen 3 months thereafter only she passed away in the meantime! In this particular case, she had willed her estate to a nephew who was obliged by law to complete the sale. It took about 2 months for the will to be published and another month for it to be potentially contested. All in all, the completion happened with a 5 month delay (with August in the middle).
Lesson learned .... get the completion date fixed asap after the compromesso if there are no apparent "issues" with the property. 3 months is VERY risky when you buy from eldery people. On top of that, they generally go through traumatic change which makes matters worse!

David
[url]www.ourtoscana.com[/url][/QUOTE]

In 1965 lawyer Andre Francois Raffray made an unusual deal with one of his older clients he agreed to purchase Jean Calment's home in return for a monthly pension payment for the rest of her life. At the time she was 90 and he 47 so the actuarial odds were in Raffray's favour but on her 120th birthday Mme. Calment joked to him that: "We all make bad deals in life".
He died on Christmas Day of the same year aged 77...