How to Assess the Legal Framework Used to Secure Real Estate Transactions in France and England?

This research has been launched in reaction to the assessment of property registration law published in the World Bank Doing Business reports (DB). The research team was chaired by Bertrand du Marais, Marie-France Nicolas and David Marrani. The aim of the research was to identify the methodology of a rigorous and comparative assessment of the legal certainty produced by French and English law, pertaining to real estate properties with professional use. Like the DB reports, this work is one of the rare legal impact assessments dealing with real estate property focused on real estate properties with professional use.

This comparative research was carried out simultaneously in France and England by a multidisciplinary academic team, with the assistance of practitioners, composed on the one hand, of lawyers, and on the other hand, of economists and management specialists. The “GIP Mission de recherche “Droit et Justice””, in the framework of the Economic Attractiveness of Law Program sponsored this research.

The team work is described in this introduction along with the major findings of the research in a policy oriented way for the use of policy makers (especially the ministry of Justice) and of the relevant professions (especially the notariat).

The main operational lessons from the research are threefold:

The irrelevance of the Doing Business methodology

The comparative description of the legal framework used in the two legal systems, as well as the practices in real business life, demonstrates that it is impossible to sequence such a transaction in order to assess the efficiency of law.

However, and for each country under review, the Doing Business reports are based on the synthetic quantitative index of “the ease of doing business”.