What is a “copropriété” ?

What is a copropriété, a co-owned building?

When investing in the South of France, you might buy a flat in a building.

The flat is in a copropriété – a co owned building, to which each owners is obliged to respect the rules and pay regularly “charges” to participate to the costs generated by the use and maintain of common parts the building in proportion to the shares you hold in the building, i.e. the size of your flat determines a number of tentième to calculate the proportion in which you shall participate in the maintenance of the building (stair case, electricity in the common part, letter boxes, façades, lift, cleaning, garden maintenance etc. ).

The copropriété as all community has a story and may have current unsolved issues such as a water leak which may be due to the maintenance of the common parts of the building and therefore the co-owners are obliged to pay for the refection.

You may want to understand the consequences of buying in a copropriété.

The maintenance of a building can be very expensive especially when the time has come to redo the façade or the roof or pay for putting the lift in compliance with recent regulation.

If the refection of the façade has been voted by the seller as co-owner of the building (“assemblée générale des copropriétaires”) before signing the sell of the flat, then the seller is legally bound to pay for the works.

This should be sorted out in the “compromis” in case a vote is organised between the signature of the compromis and the signature of the deed of sell.

This kind of issue can be for you a no-way to invest in the building, so before signing any legal documents you may want to get in touch with the syndic (most of the time co-owners delegate the governance of the building to a syndic) to know what are the pending issues.