A German national buys a Paris apartment from a Cypriot company, financed by a British bank, through a power of attorney apostilled in London and a Luxembourg holding structure. Nothing in that file is defective on its face — and nothing in it is safe. The apostilled power of attorney is not authentic within the meaning of French law and cannot support a mortgage; no deed executed by a foreign notary can be recorded in the French land registry; a foreign holding company that misses a reporting deadline becomes liable for an annual 3% tax on the property. None of this stems from the complexity of the market. It stems from the fact that a cross-border acquisition crosses legal systems the contract itself tends to ignore. Here are the six points that determine whether the transaction actually holds.
1. The property does not move: the lex rei sitae governs the right, not the contract
Article 3, paragraph 2, of the Civil Code has stated the rule since 1804: any building located in France is governed by French law as to its proprietary status, regardless of the nationality, residence or intentions of the parties. This governs the numerus clausus of property rights, the modes of acquiring ownership, the ranking of security interests and the entire system of land registration. It does not govern the contractual obligations of the sale, which fall under the Rome I Regulation, nor the capacity of the parties, nor the powers of a purchasing company’s directors. This split is the principal source of disputes: a transaction can be perfectly valid under the law of the contract and remain without effect in rem in the State where the property is situated.
2. The courts of the property’s location have exclusive jurisdiction, and it cannot be contracted around
Article 24(1) of the Brussels I bis Regulation gives exclusive jurisdiction over disputes concerning rights in rem in immovable property to the courts of the Member State where the property is situated — regardless of the parties’ domicile, and regardless of any jurisdiction clause to the contrary, which Article 25(4) strips of effect. The Court of Justice reads this narrowly: it covers actions based on a right in rem enforceable against everyone, not a right in personam (Webb, C-294/92). A single dispute can even split between two courts in two States, as Schmidt (CJEU, 16 November 2016, C-417/15) illustrates, where annulment of a gift and cancellation of the corresponding land-registry entry fell under two different heads of jurisdiction. More recently, on 10 July 2025 (C-99/24), the Court held that a claim for compensation for occupying a property without title after a lease has ended falls outside this exclusive jurisdiction altogether, since it sounds in tort rather than in a right in rem — a reminder that the boundary is drawn narrowly and moves with the case law. This must be anticipated when drafting dispute-resolution clauses, not discovered when litigating.
3. A foreign deed cannot be recorded in the French land registry — and the sanction is not nullity, it is losing the property
Article 710-1 of the Civil Code requires that any deed give rise to land-registry formalities only if it results from a notarial deed executed by a notary practising in France, a court decision, or an authentic instrument from an administrative authority. A deed executed abroad remains valid between the parties, since transfer of ownership occurs solo consensu, but Article 30-1 of the Decree of 4 January 1955 makes it unenforceable against third parties who acquired competing registered rights from the same seller. Facing a diligent second buyer or a registered creditor, an unregistered right is, in practical terms, a lost one. The fix is known: re-execution before a notary practising in France, on the basis of powers of attorney meeting French formal requirements.
4. An apostilled power of attorney is not automatically authentic — and the apostille does not fix that
This is the most frequent breaking point in cross-border files. The Cour de cassation held that a notary public who merely certifies a signature, without reading or explaining the scope of the undertaking, does not confer authenticity — and the apostille changes nothing, since it certifies only the genuineness of the signature, not the substance of the act (Cass. 1re civ., 14 April 2016, no. 15-18.157). Powers of attorney executed in civil-law notarial countries are generally accepted; those from common-law or Nordic jurisdictions call for strict scrutiny. The safest route today is a notarial power of attorney executed remotely before a French notary under Article 20-1 of the Decree of 26 November 1971.
5. Foreign holding structures face a hard reporting deadline, not a soft compliance expectation
Article 67 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 will require any entity incorporated outside the Union to disclose its beneficial owners to a Member State’s central register before completing the purchase of real property situated in the Union, once the regulation applies generally on 10 July 2027. Structures that already own property by that date must regularise their position by 10 January 2028, with acquisitions predating 1 January 2014 excluded. For an offshore holding structure, beneficial-ownership disclosure stops being paperwork to sort out later and becomes a condition of signing.
6. A frozen asset cannot be sold, and the “golden visa” route to residence has largely closed
Regulation (EU) No. 269/2014 defines economic resources broadly enough to capture real estate: a building held by a designated person is frozen as a matter of law, and Article 2(2) prohibits making it available even indirectly — which catches acquisition through a nominee or interposed structure as much as payment of the price to a designated seller. Separately, the assumption that buying property in the EU opens a right of residence is now largely obsolete: Spain abolished its investor route for new applications on 3 April 2025 (Organic Law 1/2025), with none of the former routes — €500,000 in real estate, shares, deposits or bonds — still open. Portugal removed the real estate route from its programme in October 2023, leaving investment funds, job creation and cultural heritage as the surviving paths. Greece has kept its real estate route but raised the thresholds sharply where demand is highest — around €800,000 in Attica, Thessaloniki, Mykonos and Santorini, and €400,000 elsewhere. These regimes move fast and under sustained European institutional pressure, and they should never be the determining reason for a transaction without checking the state of the law as of the date of commitment.
None of these six points is exotic. Each one is a place where a cross-border acquisition is commonly assumed to be secured at signing, when in fact it was secured — or lost — six to twelve weeks earlier, at the structuring stage. Our practical guide to cross-border real estate acquisition sets out the full operational roadmap, from characterisation and due diligence through documentation and completion.