You own a flat in France, it is let to a tenant, and your plans have changed. Perhaps you want to sell while prices in your arrondissement are still holding, or you want to move into the flat yourself, or house a child who is starting work in Paris. In France, none of this happens with a simple letter. The lease survives the sale, the tenant enjoys a statutory right to buy before anyone else, and a notice served one week too late or signed by the wrong person can be annulled, sending you back to the start of a six-month clock. This guide explains, for non-resident owners, the two lawful exits from a residential lease: the congé pour vente (notice to sell) and the congé pour reprise (notice to repossess), the tenant’s droit de préemption (pre-emption right), and the traps that void these notices, as clarified by five recent rulings of the Third Civil Chamber of the Court of Cassation.
The starting point surprises many foreign owners. Under Article 1743 of the Civil Code, « Si le bailleur vend la chose louée, l’acquéreur ne peut expulser le fermier, le métayer ou le locataire qui a un bail authentique ou dont la date est certaine. » In plain English: if you sell a let flat, the buyer steps into your shoes and cannot evict a tenant who holds a proper lease. The lease continues on the same terms until its end date. This is why selling a tenanted flat in France means either selling with the tenant in place, usually at a discount, or first bringing the lease lawfully to an end. Both routes run through Article 15 of the Act of 6 July 1989, the statute governing the bail d’habitation (residential lease), which allows the landlord, and only the landlord, to give notice six months before the end of the lease, either to sell or to repossess, or for a legitimate and serious reason. Everything that follows is the practical detail that decides whether that notice stands up in court.
I. Selling a tenanted flat: the congé pour vente and the tenant’s right of first refusal
The congé pour vente is the notice by which a landlord tells the tenant that the lease will end because the flat is being sold. But it is much more than a termination letter: by operation of law, the notice itself constitutes an offer to sell the flat to the tenant, on the price and conditions stated in it. That double nature explains both its power and its fragility. Get the offer right and the tenant either buys, giving you a clean sale without agency uncertainty, or declines, freeing you to sell on the market. Get it wrong and the tenant can have the notice annulled, or even have a later sale to a third party annulled, while you lose a year.
A. A notice that is also a sale offer: six months, price, conditions and compulsory wording
Four formal requirements decide the fate of almost every congé pour vente, and foreign owners breach them more often than domestic ones, usually because the notice is drafted abroad, translated loosely, or signed by only one of several co-owners.
First, timing and service. The notice must reach the tenant at least six months before the end of the current lease period, and it must be served by a commissaire de justice (judicial officer, formerly known as a bailiff) or by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt. An ordinary email, a letter sent by standard post, or a message passed through the managing agent does not count. Because the six-month period runs from receipt, a landlord living in London, New York or Dubai should instruct service well in advance and keep the proof of delivery: if the tenant collects the registered letter two weeks late, the clock starts on collection, and a notice that looked timely can arrive too late. A late notice is not postponed; it is ineffective, and the lease renews.
Second, the price and conditions of the sale must be stated precisely. The tenant cannot sensibly exercise a right of first refusal against a vague offer, so the courts require the notice to specify the sale price and the terms of payment and transfer. A notice that omits the price, that describes the conditions of sale incompletely, or that quotes a deliberately prohibitive price designed to frighten the tenant off rather than to sell, exposes the landlord to annulment. Practitioners summarise the case law as a list of about ten recurring grounds for annulment, and missing or distorted price terms sit at the top of it, alongside late service and defective notification. For a foreign seller, the practical lesson is to fix a genuine market price before serving notice, supported by a recent valuation, and to reproduce it identically in the notice and in any later listing: a significant gap between the notice price and the price at which the flat is then offered to the public invites the tenant to argue that the offer was never sincere.
Third, the notice must reproduce the first five paragraphs of Article 15, II of the Act of 6 July 1989. This is a pure formality, but omission is fatal: the tenant must be able to read, in the notice itself, the rules governing the offer, the two-month acceptance period and the consequences of refusal. A notice drafted from a foreign template that summarises the tenant’s rights in English instead of reproducing the statutory French text fails this test. Always use a notice drafted under French law, in French, and check that the reproduction is complete and current.
Fourth, the acceptance mechanics favour the tenant and bind the landlord. The tenant has two months from receipt of the offer to accept. If the tenant accepts, the sale must go through on the stated terms. If the tenant declines or stays silent, the landlord recovers freedom to sell, but that freedom is qualified: if the landlord later decides to sell at a lower price or on better terms for the buyer, the tenant benefits from a second, subsidiary pre-emption right. The notaire handling the sale must then notify the tenant of the new price and conditions, and that notification itself constitutes a fresh offer. A sale concluded with a third party without this second notification can be annulled at the tenant’s request. Foreign sellers who reduce the asking price after a few quiet months on the market are the classic victims of this rule: the price cut reactivates the tenant’s right, and skipping the notaire’s notification voids the sale. Before accepting any offer below the notice price, ask the notaire in writing to serve the subsidiary offer on the tenant and to wait out the response period. For an overview of how a French purchase and sale is structured around these steps, foreign buyers and sellers can consult the firm’s analysis of each stage of the transaction on its French real estate law practice page.
Two further points complete the picture. The notice must state its ground clearly: a notice that mixes sale and repossession, or that hides the sale behind vague language, can be struck down for lack of a stated motive, since Article 15 requires the notice to indicate the alleged ground on pain of nullity. And furnished lettings follow a shorter rhythm: where the flat is let furnished under a one-year lease, the landlord’s notice period is three months rather than six, but the pre-emption machinery otherwise applies in the same way.
B. When the tenant declines: the second offer at a lower price, the agency-fee trap and the unanimous co-owner rule
Once the tenant has refused the initial offer, three recent Court of Cassation rulings redraw the map of what happens next, and each of them corrects a mistake that foreign owners commonly make.
The first concerns estate agency commission. Suppose the tenant refuses the initial offer, the owner mandates an agent, the agent finds a third-party buyer, and the tenant then exercises the subsidiary pre-emption right over that deal, stepping into the buyer’s shoes at the same price. Who pays the agent’s commission: the tenant who now buys? On 1 March 2023, the Third Civil Chamber answered no and quashed the appeal ruling that had charged the tenants. The Court recalled the governing principle of the remuneration of intermediaries: Article 6 of the Act of 2 January 1970 is not the operative link here; the decisive rule, stated in the ruling itself, is that « le droit à rémunération de l’agent immobilier, auquel un mandat de recherche a été confié, suppose une mise en relation entre le vendeur et l’acquéreur. » In English: an agent entrusted with finding a buyer is only paid if the agent actually introduced the seller to the buyer. Read the full ruling in Cass. 3rd civ., 1 March 2023, no. 21-22.073. A tenant who buys by exercising a statutory pre-emption over an offer notified by the notaire was never introduced by the agent, so the commission cannot be loaded onto the tenant by making it part of the substituted price. For a foreign seller, the consequence is direct: negotiate the agency mandate so that commission is due only on a sale genuinely introduced by the agent, and never present the tenant’s substituted purchase as commission-bearing. Otherwise the commission clause inflates the price, the tenant challenges it, and the dispute delays or derails completion.
The second ruling concerns families and co-ownership, a frequent configuration for foreign-held French property inherited or bought jointly. On 2 July 2026, the Third Civil Chamber quashed a ruling that had upheld a congé pour vente served by only some of the co-owners of a flat held in indivision (joint undivided ownership). The Court held that the notice, which by law constitutes an offer of sale, is an act of disposal of the undivided property, and Article 815-3 of the Civil Code provides that « sauf nécessité de payer les dettes et charges de l’indivision, les actes de disposition relatifs aux biens indivis requièrent le consentement de tous les indivisaires. » In English: except where needed to pay the debts and charges of the joint ownership, acts disposing of undivided property require the consent of all the joint owners. Because the notice is worth an offer of sale, it requires unanimous consent; a notice served without one co-owner’s agreement suffers from a lack of authority, which is a substantive irregularity, and the tenant can rely on it to obtain annulment without even proving harm. Read the full ruling in Cass. 3rd civ., 2 July 2026, no. 25-13.188. Foreign co-owners should take this literally: before serving any notice to sell, collect the written agreement of every person on the title, including a former spouse, a sibling or a parent who co-owns but lives abroad and takes no part in management. If one co-owner refuses, the sale project must be resolved within the co-ownership first; the tenant’s lease cannot be used to force the pace.
The third point is the sanction that gives the subsidiary pre-emption its teeth. Where the owner, after the tenant’s initial refusal, decides to sell at a more favourable price or on better terms, the notaire must notify the tenant of those terms, on pain of nullity of the sale, and that notification counts as an offer of sale to the tenant. The Cour de cassation applies this strictly: the tenant who accepts the notified offer buys on those terms, and the intermediary who merely found the displaced third-party buyer has no claim against the tenant. For the foreign seller, the operational checklist is therefore short and rigid: serve the initial offer correctly; if the market forces a price reduction, instruct the notaire to notify the tenant before signing anything with a new buyer; keep written proof of each notification; and never treat the tenant’s silence on the first offer as the end of the story.
II. Moving in or housing a relative: the congé pour reprise and the tenants the law protects
The congé pour reprise is the notice by which the landlord takes the flat back in order to live in it as a résidence principale (principal residence) or to house a close relative there. It is the route foreign owners most often consider when a child moves to France for studies or work, when they plan their own return, or when they want to stop letting and keep the flat for family use. It uses the same six-month notice period as the notice to sell, but its logic is personal rather than commercial: the landlord must genuinely intend the stated occupation, and the courts test that intention with growing rigour. Two 2023 to 2025 rulings, plus the special protection of elderly tenants, define the current boundaries.
A. A real and serious intent judged on the day the notice is served
Article 15, I of the Act of 6 July 1989 allows the landlord to give notice to take back the flat, and adds the decisive sentence: « Lorsqu’il donne congé à son locataire pour reprendre le logement, le bailleur justifie du caractère réel et sérieux de sa décision de reprise. » In English: when the landlord gives the tenant notice to take back the flat, the landlord must show that the decision to repossess is genuine and serious. The full current text sits in Article 15 of the Act of 6 July 1989. Three consequences flow from this for a foreign owner planning a move.
First, the beneficiary is strictly limited. The notice must name the person who will live in the flat and state the relationship, and that person can only be the landlord, the landlord’s spouse, the partner bound by a civil solidarity pact registered at the date of the notice, a long-standing cohabiting partner, or the ascendants or descendants of the landlord or of those persons. A notice to house a friend, a business associate, a nephew outside the permitted circle, or a company does not qualify. Where the owner is a company, including a family société civile immobilière (non-trading property company), repossession for personal occupation is in practice unavailable, which is one more reason to choose the holding structure before buying rather than after letting.
Second, genuineness is assessed on the day the notice is served, and later events count only as evidence of that earlier intention. On 12 October 2023, the Third Civil Chamber rejected tenants’ challenge to a repossession notice served by a widowed landlord who wanted to return to live near his family, accepting electoral registration, works invoices and utility contracts, some of them post-dating the notice, as proof of an intention formed at the notice date. The Court also approved the appeal judges’ statement of the formal rule: « La cour d’appel a énoncé, à bon droit, que la prescription de la justification dans le congé du caractère réel et sérieux de la décision de reprise, à titre de condition de forme, n’est pas édictée à peine de nullité. » In English: the appeal court rightly held that the requirement to state the genuine and serious grounds in the notice, as a matter of form, is not prescribed on pain of nullity. Read the full ruling in Cass. 3rd civ., 12 October 2023, no. 22-18.580. The lesson cuts both ways. A landlord need not plead the whole life story inside the notice itself, but must be able to prove, if challenged, that the project was real when notice was served. Documents created afterwards help only if they illuminate the earlier intent; a project invented after service does not.
Third, the judge examines the whole situation and gives reasons, which protects landlords with a coherent story as much as tenants against sham notices. On 3 July 2025, the Third Civil Chamber upheld a repossession by a 63-year-old landlord, himself a tenant of his own home, who wanted to occupy one of his flats to cut his housing costs ahead of retirement, even though he also owned other let property and had not yet retired. The Court accepted that the ongoing dispute could explain the postponed retirement and that the income from his remaining property was modest, concluding that the genuine and serious character of the intent, on the date of the notice, had been properly established. The same ruling then quashed the award of damages against the tenant for abusive resistance to the landlord’s claim, holding: « En statuant ainsi, sans caractériser un comportement fautif de la locataire de nature à faire dégénérer en abus l’exercice de son droit de contester la validité du congé délivré par le bailleur, la cour d’appel a violé le texte susvisé. » In English: by ruling as it did, without identifying any wrongful conduct by the tenant capable of turning her exercise of the right to challenge the notice into an abuse, the appeal court breached the cited provision, namely Article 1240 of the Civil Code, under which « Tout fait quelconque de l’homme, qui cause à autrui un dommage, oblige celui par la faute duquel il est arrivé à le réparer. » Read the full ruling in Cass. 3rd civ., 3 July 2025, no. 24-11.504. In plain terms: merely defending oneself in court is not a civil wrong, and tenants who lose on the notice cannot automatically be billed extra for having fought. Landlords should therefore budget for a contested procedure without counting on recovering the cost from the tenant beyond the standard litigation expenses.
For a foreign owner, the practical file for a congé pour reprise writes itself from these rulings: name a permitted beneficiary and the exact link; describe the genuine project in the notice; assemble dated proof that the project existed when notice was served, such as school enrolment, an employment contract, removal quotes, deregistration from the foreign address or registration steps in France; and occupy the flat within a reasonable time after departure, since reletting quickly at a higher rent is the classic evidence of a sham notice, exposing the landlord to damages for fraud.
B. Elderly tenants with modest means, fraudulent notices and the Paris dimension
Even a formally perfect notice fails against certain tenants. Where the tenant is over 65 at the end of the lease and has annual income below the ceiling set for state-assisted rental housing, the landlord cannot refuse renewal without offering the tenant rehousing matched to the tenant’s needs and means. This protection, in Article 15, III of the 1989 Act, applies to both notices to sell and notices to repossess, and it catches many foreign landlords by surprise, because the age and income thresholds have nothing to do with nationality or with the landlord’s own plans.
On 24 October 2024, the Third Civil Chamber rejected a landlord’s challenge and fixed the only point that still divided the lower courts: which twelve months count for the income test. The Court held that « les ressources à prendre en compte pour calculer ce montant sont celles perçues par le locataire au titre des douze mois qui précédent la délivrance du congé. » In English: the income to be taken into account is the income received by the tenant over the twelve months preceding service of the notice. Read the full ruling in Cass. 3rd civ., 24 October 2024, no. 23-18.067. Neither the last calendar year nor the last tax assessment as such governs; what matters is the twelve-month window ending on the date of service. Before serving any notice on a tenant who may be over 65, a prudent landlord therefore reconstructs that exact window from payslips, pension statements and tax notices, compares it with the current ministerial ceiling, and, if the tenant falls below it, either prepares a genuine rehousing offer or holds the notice. Serving first and checking later risks annulment plus a rehousing obligation imposed by the court.
Fraudulent notices form the second boundary. A notice to repossess or to sell that masks the real project, for example a notice to house a relative followed by an immediate relet at a higher rent, or a notice to sell followed by no genuine sale attempt, exposes the landlord to damages, and the tenant can also seek annulment of the notice. The limitation logic matters here: keep every document showing the project was pursued in good faith, from the first step to occupation or listing, because the file the landlord builds on the day of service is the file the judge reads years later.
In Paris and the inner suburbs, these national rules bite harder for three local reasons that foreign owners should price into their decisions. First, tenancies are long and tenants are often long-settled, so the over-65 protection arises frequently, particularly in the older rental stock of the capital where tenants have remained for decades. Second, the competent court for most disputes is the Paris judicial court, before which representation by a lawyer is effectively indispensable and where contestation rates are high: a defective notice served from abroad will very likely be challenged rather than accepted. Third, the economics of error are unforgiving: with Paris sale prices and rents at their level, six lost months of rent plus a renewed lease can cost more than proper advice would ever have. Landlords holding in the capital who are unsure whether their tenant is protected, whether their co-ownership file is complete, or whether their project qualifies as genuine and serious can have the notice reviewed against the current case law with the firm’s Paris real estate team before anything is served, since prevention here costs a fraction of annulment.
Conclusion
Selling or repossessing a tenanted flat in France is a procedure, not a letter. The lease survives the sale until a valid notice ends it; the notice to sell is worth an offer the tenant may take up, including at a reduced price notified later by the notaire; the notice to repossess stands or falls on the genuineness of the project on the day it is served; and tenants over 65 with modest means cannot be refused renewal without a matching rehousing offer, measured over the twelve months before service. The five rulings discussed here share one message for non-resident owners: French courts forgive little on form, examine everything on substance, and punish sham notices while protecting tenants who simply defend their rights. Build the file before serving, serve through the proper channel, secure every co-owner’s agreement, notify every price change, and keep the proof. Done in that order, the exit you planned is the exit the court will uphold.