What to check before you offer on a house in France

By Phil, French House Check. 16 September 2026.

About thirty things can be checked on a French house from public records before you offer, in a day, without leaving your desk. They fall into six groups. The first group is the one everyone skips, and it is the one that makes the rest worthless if it is wrong.

1. What you are actually buying

• The parcels, by cadastral reference, and whether their total matches the land area in the advert. Rural properties are nearly always several parcels; an advert giving 2,600 m² against one 1,484 m² parcel means land you have not identified.
• Every building on those parcels and within 50 m, counted on the aerial photograph with the boundaries drawn over it. A roof the record does not show is a question for the agent.
• The floor area and where the figure comes from: the energy certificate, the agent, or nobody. Every price calculation hangs off it.

2. What you may do with it

• The planning document in force, PLU or carte communale, and the zone the parcels sit in.
• What that zone allows: extension and its cap, annexes and their distance rule, pools, change of use of outbuildings, and whether the field can ever be a plot.
• Servitudes: monument perimeters, risk plan zones, reserved strips for road widening, protected features on or beside the land.
• Land nearby earmarked for building (AU zones), which is where "the field opposite is zoned for a housing estate" shows up before the viewing.

3. What the ground can do to you

• Flood: the risk plan and its zone colour, the distance to the nearest watercourse and the height above it, and the commune's disaster orders.
• Clay shrinkage, which cracks old walls in dry summers, rated at the address.
• Radon category, and whether the house has a cellar and no ventilation.
• Cavities, old quarries and ground movement within a few kilometres.
• Earthquake zone, which decides whether structural work is regulated.

4. What the neighbours can do to you

• Classified industrial and farm installations nearby, with the register's address checked against its map point, because the register gets this wrong.
• Former industrial and polluted sites.
• Archaeology zones, which can mean a dig before a permit.
• Anything consented but not yet built: a grain store, a business zone, a lotissement.

5. What it should cost

• Sold prices of comparable houses within a few kilometres from the national transaction register, as a band per m², never a single figure.
• The energy certificate from the national register: label, running cost, boiler age, what is insulated and what is not.
• Time on the market, which the advert never states and the agency's own files usually reveal.
• Taxe foncière and the annual running cost, and the cost of the works the records already imply.

6. What only the seller can give you

• The SPANC report on private drainage, and the grade of any fault.
• The état des risques, the official risk statement.
• The energy audit, compulsory with an F or G rated sale.
• The deeds, which settle the parcel list.
• The date of the mandate, which replaces every inference about time on market.

What none of it can see

Planning permissions already granted are held at the mairie and are not published. Registers record what was declared, not what exists. And no record describes the condition of the house. That is the surveyor's job, and these checks tell you which house is worth paying a surveyor to visit.