Hidden defects cause legal row for €1 house in France

A couple who bought a house for €1 in central France are threatening to take the town council that sold it to court, in a case which has shone a light on the country’s vice caché (hidden defect) laws. 

The property was built on the site of an old monastery in Saint Chamond in Loire, and the new owners spent €75,000 making it more habitable.

However, when tenants were installed in 2022 they reported that the house was repeatedly being flooded.

Investigations by surveyors concluded that the hill behind the house was collecting and funnelling water into it, and remedial drainage would cost at least an additional €25,000 – a sum the owners had not budgeted for and will have difficulty raising.

Building inspectors ordered them to have the work done by mid-April, or risk having the property declared unfit for habitation.

The couple are now considering taking the town council to court, arguing the drainage problem was not made known to them when they bought the house.

The council told The Connexion “the door was still open” for discussions with the owners to potentially avoid litigation.

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Legal experts told French media it was possible that the sale could be annulled and the buyers compensated for their losses.

However, they doubted if the vice caché clause could be used because the sales paperwork stipulated that the house was sold on an “as seen” basis.

The vice caché clause is most often applied in cases concerning cars, where a fault in the design of a vehicle means it breaks down far earlier than expected.

At the moment, Peugeot and Citroën are repairing both petrol and diesel cars for free under the rule after problems with pulleys on a timing belt system on the petrol motor, and a weak chain on the timing system in the case of the diesel motor.

Read more: Owners of faulty Peugeot, Citroën and Opel cars can now make claims

However, the law has also been used in a number of high-profile property cases, with varying degrees of success.

In 2022, for example, the buyer of a €230,000 house in Martinique asked for the sale to be annulled on the grounds a vice caché because the house, 40m and a block away from the beach, was regularly subject to smells from decomposing seaweed.

She said her asthmatic child could not stay in the house when this happened.

The sellers claimed they did not intentionally hide the fact and that the smell was widely known about after featuring in news reports.

After going through the court system all the way to the Cour de Cassation, the sale was eventually annulled.

A more recent case, decided in February, concerned a man who bought a house with the intention of extending it.

However, he subsequently found that a collective dirty water drain, for four surrounding houses, ran under his kitchen, making it impossible to do the work he envisaged.

The man argued that the drains were a vice caché, which had not been declared in the sales papers.

The sellers argued that the purchase had been on an “as seen” basis, and so should not be annulled.

Judges at the Cour de cassation agreed that the “as seen” clause meant vice caché rules could not be applied, but insisted the sale be annulled anyway because the drain should have been mentioned as a servitude.

A case from 1999 resulted in compensation to buyers under vice caché rules when they discovered that walls of their house, built on clay, were unstable.

The vendors had covered giveaway cracks in the wall with rendering and plasterboard.

How does vice caché clause work?

The legal principle is that if buyers discover a vice caché in the property, of which they were not aware when purchasing the house, they can annul the sale or seek damages from the seller.

The defect must be of such a nature that they would not have bought the property had they known about it, or would have offered substantially less for it.

You have two years from the date you discovered the 'hidden defect' to bring a claim, within an overall limit of 20 years.

Note that in many property transactions a clause is included that the buyer “fera son affaire” with any faults found after the deal, which means they cannot claim a vice caché.