Making our offer and completion

Landing back in the UK from our whistle stop house hunting holiday, everything at home looked different, suddenly our lovely victorian town house didn't really feel like home! I craved the sea views and olive gardens of Corfu. Work, nursing, was becoming unbearable with the Covid-19 cases mounting every day. We would sit talking about the house, the move and everything we would need to do to make it possible. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. The thought of selling up and moving to another country seemed an almost impossible task but after much deliberation, the pros outweighed the cons and we bite the bullet and put an offer in on our Corfu dream house. Yes, it wasn't what we expected from the listing and needed a heck of a lot more work than we first thought, but it had EVERYTHING we wanted and OH SO MUCH POTENTIAL!

Although not our first property purchase, this was our first time buying a property abroad, so we spent our evenings reading up on the process, joined all the Corfu Facebook groups and watched the message boards for hints and tips.

The buying process

After crunching the numbers a lot! We had our best and final offer, with Brexit looming and knowing we wanted this to be our #foreverhome time was ticking for the purchase to go through before the Brexit deadline of the 31st December 2020. Completing on the house before the Brexit deadline enabled us to apply for Greek residency under the Withdrawal Agreement. Which meant we could live and work all year round in Corfu, as residents, and not be restricted by the 90/180 day rule for non EU residents. We were extremely lucky, buying property as a Brit, now the UK is out of the EU and applying for residency in Greece has changed, and isn't quite so straight forward, for more information on living in Greece as a Brit post Brexit please see: https://brexit.gov.gr/uk-citizens-in-greece/

Once our offer was accepted we instructed an English speaking lawyer in Corfu town, Florent-Heracles Kavadas at CFU Law (He has been superb!). We then signed a Pre-Contract with the real estate agency and paid a 10% deposit of the purchase price, this took the house off the market. As part of this pre-contract we were required to agreed that if we didn't proceed with the property purchase our deposit would be forfeited, bit of a nervy moment! Florent-Heracles Kavadas at CFU Law oversaw all the legal conveyancing including the house purchase, residency applications and setting up water and electricity etc . I cannot recommend Florent highly enough, he and his team have been excellent throughout! We used Smart Currency Exchange for purchasing our euros and transferring the funds for the purchase, getting a better rate of exchange with them than through our high street bank.

Offer accepted and deposit paid

After the deposit was paid and the house was taken off the market, that was it we were contract bound to buy it or loose thousands. Florent our lawyer set about getting us a greek tax number, greek bank account and started the application for our beige (pre Brexit) residency permits. Due to the covid travel restrictions and being unable to travel to Corfu due to work and national lockdowns we needed to arrange Power of Attorney through our lawyer in Greece and instructed a local Notary in the UK to notarise this. With Florent it was all smooth sailing we were kept up to date with the process and this freed us up to get our affairs in order in the UK.

Selling up - and getting real!

We put our house on the market in the UK, this helped us release some capital for the move and for funding the house renovations in Corfu. We were extremely lucky not to need the house sale to go though before our Corfu purchase. We put our Victorian townhouse in Newcastle upon-Tyne on the market with Giraffe Lets on a Wednesday by the Thursday we had our first viewing.

A lovely couple came to view the house on the Friday, they put an offer in on the house by that afternoon and after some haggling over the weekend we accepted an offer on the house over asking on the Monday. We were delighted! We loved that house and knew the couple would love the house and its history as much as we did.

Becoming Greek residents

We travelled to Corfu in December, 2020, to finalise the house purchase and apply for our beige residency permits. Again, Florent helped us with our residency permits. After getting our permits this covered us under the Withdrawal Agreement and has enabled us to apply for our Biometric permits post Brexit. For more information on residency please see: https://brexit.gov.gr/uk-citizens-in-greece/

Moving our belonging

The Corfu house completed just in the nick of time a few days before the Brexit deadline! The next stage was shipping our belongs from Newcastle Upon-Tyne to Corfu. We used Global Moving Services for this and it door to door it took just over 3 weeks for our belongings to arrive. The delivery guys were lovely and even took the stuff into the allocated rooms! So after our belongings arrived it was back to the UK for a few months to tie up loose ends and get ready for the #BIGMOVE