You want to sell your property in France and about to sign a mandate with an agency, you don’t really know what a mandate is and you are fearing another French bureaucratic nightmare ???
Let me help you through this!
If you want to work with an estate agent in France to sell your property you will need to sign a “mandat de vente”. In English that is known as a sales contract. It’s the law, an agency is not authorised to market a property without a valid mandat. This is the contract that formalises exactly what the agency will do and how much it will be paid. Signing the mandate does not mean you will have anything to pay. The agent’s fees are only paid on successful completion of the sale.
The mandate will have the name of the seller, name and contact details of the agency, description of the property, the agency fees, duration of the contract and an explanation of what the agent will do to sell the property. Unless the mandate is signed at the agent’s offices, you have a 14 day cooling off period before it becomes valid. It can be exclusive or non-exclusive. The difference is down to costs versus motivating an agent. They have many properties to sell. You want them to prioritise yours!
So in the case of an exclusive mandate – the aim is to increase the speed of sale of your property and to achieve the best price. A period of exclusivity motivates the sales agency because it is usually time limited – the agent will want to make the most of the time they have as the sole person marketing the property. The advantages for the seller are that the agency will work for reduced fees. Your property will only be advertised with one agency. It won’t be “over-advertised”, this increases the attractiveness of the property to a buyer. The agency will be fully focused on your sale. Although, with your consent there can be delegations to other agencies, you will only have one contact for arranging visits and receiving offers, this makes the sales process much easier for the seller to handle. There should be a time limit to the exclusivity. Otherwise the agent might not have the motivation you seek. 3 months is fair. The disadvantage of an exclusive mandate is that it only works if you have a good motivated agency with a good track record of attracting buyers! You need to trust the people you are working with.
The advantages of a non-exclusive mandate are that you can maximise your sales opportunities by working with any number of agents, this means you are not taking a risk with just one agency. But beware, over-exposure does not look good to your prospective buyer. In this case each agent will advertise your property on various portals like Rightmove, in this case it is common to see the same property for sale at slightly different prices, this looks bad to a buyer. Dealing with multiple agents, and sometimes having to juggle the same buyer with more than one agent, is not easy. The other disadvantage of a non-exclusive mandate is that it will normally cost more.
If this hasn’t helped, what can you do?
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Hello,
I found a property I wish to purchase. The sellers have a non-exclusive contract with the estate agents and they have advertised privately. I contacted the sellers directly to make an offer but they say they can only deal with me through the agent because my very first contact with them was through the agent. Is there any way around this? can I find a way to buy directly from them?
It would be usual for the seller to have signed a contract with the agent that states that they will be liable to pay the commission if anyone they have presented subsequently buys the property. “Going direct” is something that annoys agents considerably so you can expect an agent to follow this up and claim the commission owed.
If I have a non-exclusive mandate with two agencies and then want to go exclusive with a third agancy, do I have to officially cancel/release the first two non-exclusive mandates? If so, how?
You do. The quickest way would be to send them an email. If they acknowledge the request you should be OK. The correct way is to send a registered letter one that records the response. An RAR (Recommandée avec avis de réception), this can also be done online but at a cost of about 7€ – https://www.laposte.fr/lettre-recommandee-en-ligne
Thank you very much Gareth.
I am interested in a french property which is listed by at least four agents. I visited the property on er twelve months ago having found it on google earth. The neighbour showed us round.
We recently put in an offer which was fair for the vendor, but the agent did not like it because his commission would have to be shaved. This agent had the property listed for only a fortnight and did not conduct a viewing with us. Easy money! (If one of the other agents sells the property he gets nada!)
Questions.
1. can we now go to another agent involved and deal through them?
2. Given that there are so many agents involved why can’t we just go direct to the notaire?
3. What does the term Mandat Direct mean?
A lot of this depends on the contract (mandat) that the owner has with their agent or agents. You could deal with any of the agents involved, saying that, if you have had some communication with one of them (even an email update about the property) then you should start with that agent. A “mandat direct” is probably a “mandat exclusif direct”, so in this case one of the agents has control of the sale and has delegated the sale to other agents they work with. So normally in this situation the controlling agent will get 50% and the delegated agent 50%. If you use the information that you gained from the internet to go direct then fair enough. If the mandat the owner has with the agents allows him to work direct then they can do that. We’d hope that the owner would value our services sufficiently to ask us to act as an intermediary. I don’t agree with your “easy money” statement. There is a lot more to this job than listing a property and then counting the money. Take a look at this sellers pack we have to get some idea. Alpine Property Sellers Pack
In this insurance it’s easy money. Fourth to list, same 0hotos, same info, same diagnostixs, only been on a fortnight, no viewing necessary. Nobody can claim that is not easy money, and certainly not worth 16K euros. Agents in the UK put in the same work and charge between 1.5% and 2%.
Instance not insurance
We have had instances of people working direct because they did not value our services/wanted to save some money. Things have not worked out and they have come back to us to get the job done. They have even been good enough to say thanks at the end and let us know that there was a lot more to the job that they had realised. Sometimes when you agree on a sale – you aren’t even half way to getting the deal done!