The conveyance

There are numerous activities carried out by the notary for the preparation of all necessary documentation for the conveyance. First the notary sounds out the desires of the parties so as to identify the type of deed most appropriate to achieve the purpose intended by the client, always in compliance with the law (link to money laundering regulations, N.B. this is a new page). Therefore, the notary must elicit from the parties any information that will enable him to understand fully the result they want to achieve. The parties have the right to speak to the notary personally and ask him for any clarifications or explanations they may need in order to understand the consequences and legal effects of the act. So it often happens that, in conversing with the notary, one ends up changing what had been the original idea.

Example:

• Consider the fairly common case where parents pay part of the price for the house purchased by their child; according to the circumstances, it may be useful to specify in the deed the source of the money or to make an actual donation of the property.
• It is possible that the price is not paid in full at the time of the deed, and that a part of the payment is postponed. In this case it is important to ask the notary for advice on the forms of guarantee that can be provided to the seller and the costs involved. There are in fact various forms of protection: from the preparation of bills of exchange to the registration of a legal mortgage, to a sale with conditional title, in which case the transfer of ownership of the property does not occur until payment of the final instalment of the sale price. Finally, the recent economic crisis has led to the creation of additional contractual forms such as rent to buy, where the price is substantially delayed into a number of instalments, which may also be viewed as rent.

Once the nature of the deed to be drawn up has been defined, the notary must by law perform a series of up-front checks on legality so that the contract will stand the test of time and be unassailable. Thanks to these checks, real estate litigation is almost non-existent: only 0.003% of real estate transactions come before a court!