Buying a House in Germany as a Dutch Buyer: No Cooling Off Period

A Dutch buyer signs the purchase deed and then has three days to walk away. A German buyer signs in front of a Notar and is bound the moment the reading ends.

Article 7:2 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek, the Dutch civil code, gives a private buyer three days to dissolve a home purchase after the deed is handed over. Germany offers no such window. § 311b(1) of the German civil code makes the purchase contract itself notarial, so the notary's reading is the commitment.

Tax on acquiring a home, Netherlands against Germany

Where you buy, and what for	Rate (%)
Netherlands, home you live in		2.0%
Netherlands, second home from 1 January 2026		8.0%
Germany, federal default		3.5%
Germany, top of the range set by the Länder		6.5%

Is there a cooling off period in Germany?

There is not, and the reason is that Germany spends its protection earlier. Article 7:2 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek requires a home purchase by a private buyer to be in writing, requires the deed drawn up between the parties to be handed to the buyer, and gives the buyer three days from that hand over to dissolve the purchase. The Dutch safeguard sits after signature.

Germany puts the same safeguard in front of it. § 311b(1) of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the German civil code, makes notarial recording a condition of validity for any contract to transfer land, so a German purchase contract is not a private document at all. § 13(1) of the Beurkundungsgesetz, the act governing notarial recording, then requires the whole record to be read aloud to the parties in the notary's presence, approved by them, and signed in their own hand.

The waiting period is written into the same act, and it runs first. § 17(2a) of the Beurkundungsgesetz provides that for consumer contracts requiring notarial recording, the notary should supply the buyer with the intended text, as a rule two weeks before the appointment, and that a shorter period should be recorded with its reasons. Two weeks with the draft, then a reading, then no way back.

What does the transfer tax cost next to overdrachtsbelasting?

Less than a Dutch second home, more than a Dutch first one. The Belastingdienst rate table puts overdrachtsbelasting, the Dutch tax on acquiring property, at 2 percent for a home you occupy and 8 percent from 1 January 2026 for one you do not. § 11 of the Grunderwerbsteuergesetz sets Grunderwerbsteuer, the German equivalent, at 3.5 percent and rounds the bill down to whole euros.

The German rate then moves with geography rather than with use. Article 105(2a) of the Grundgesetz, the German constitution, gives each Bundesland the power to set its own Grunderwerbsteuer rate, a power the Länder have had since 1 September 2006, and rates run from the 3.5 percent default up to 6.5 percent. North Rhine-Westphalia sits at the top of that range: Finanzamt NRW, the state tax administration, charges 6.5% on every contract notarised since 1 January 2015. Nothing in it depends on whether the buyer will live there, or on whether the buyer is Dutch.

On a 400,000 euro home, that is 32,000 euro of Dutch tax on a second home, against 14,000 euro at the German default and 26,000 euro at the top of the German range. Those three figures are arithmetic on the published rates.

We are not printing a table of sixteen rates, and neither should the sites that do so without a source. Only the 3.5 percent default and the constitutional power to deviate can be pinned to primary law; the rate on your bill is the one published by the Bundesland where the property sits.

Can your own notaris handle the transfer?

No. The Wissenschaftliche Dienste, the research service of the Bundestag, states in its 2022 paper on foreign property acquisition in Germany that the declarations needed for the Auflassung, the formal agreement transferring ownership, can be made only before a notary established in Germany, or abroad only before a German consular officer. § 925 BGB adds that both parties must be present at the same time when it is declared.

Ownership then passes under § 873 BGB only on that agreement plus entry in the Grundbuch, the German land register, and § 22 GrEStG bars the registry from entering the buyer until the tax office issues an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung, a certificate confirming that no tax objections stand in the way. The tax office must issue it once the Grunderwerbsteuer is paid, secured or deferred, on paper, with electronic transmission expressly excluded. In between, an Auflassungsvormerkung under § 883 BGB holds your place: any later dealing with the property is ineffective so far as it would defeat your claim.

Can you look a German home up the way you look up the Kadaster?

Not on your own. § 12(1) of the Grundbuchordnung, the German land register act, permits inspection only to someone who demonstrates a berechtigtes Interesse, a legitimate interest, and the same section requires the office to keep a log of who has looked, which the owner can ask to see. In practice the Grundbuchauszug, the register extract, comes to you through the seller or the notary rather than from a search you run yourself.

Three documents carry the rest. The Teilungserklärung divided the building into individually owned units, by declaration to the land registry under § 8 of the Wohnungseigentumsgesetz, the act on apartment ownership. The monthly Hausgeld is the advance fixed by the annual Wirtschaftsplan under § 28 WEG, part of it funding the Erhaltungsrücklage, the maintenance reserve owners must accumulate under § 19(2) no. 4 WEG. And § 80(3) of the Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz, the German buildings energy law, requires an Energieausweis on a sale unless a valid one exists.

Who pays the Makler?

Not the buyer alone, since 23 December 2020. §§ 656a to 656d BGB reordered estate agent commission on flats and single family houses. § 656d provides that where only one party engaged the Makler, an agreement making the other party pay is valid only if the party who hired the agent stays liable for at least the same amount, which caps the buyer's share at half. It also postpones it: the buyer's share falls due only once the hiring party has actually paid and produced proof of it.

What nobody in Germany counts

Foreign buyers. The Bundestag's research service put it plainly in that same paper: as far as can be seen, no statistics exist for the German property market on the share of foreign buyers. Nobody publishes how many Dutch buyers there are, so nobody can honestly tell you. The same paper concludes that Germany has no substantive restriction on acquiring property tied to foreign nationality or residence, and article 86 sentence 3 of the introductory act to the civil code puts European Union nationals beyond even the narrow reserve power the government otherwise keeps.

We do not give buying or selling advice, and nothing here says whether a German property is worth buying. What the sources support is checkable: no three day cooling off period, two weeks with the draft instead, a binding notarial reading, 3.5 percent as the federal default with the Bundesland free to go to 6.5, and a tax certificate standing between signature and the register. Our note on the 2026 drop from 10.4% to 8% on second homes sets out what changed at home, and the Duisburg Grundsteuer ruling shows how far German recurring costs can swing.

AiMYNDi reads the listing, the financials and the legal paperwork for a specific property, so the Teilungserklärung clause and the state of the Erhaltungsrücklage surface during those two weeks rather than after the reading. You can see an example of what a report looks like first.