Updated on 2 September 2026: Law No. 2026-796 of 18 August 2026 amends the rules for notifying the SAFER (non-contiguous properties), creates a right of inspection and extends several deadlines. The relevant sections have been updated.
Your plan to buy a farm or a wine estate is progressing well. You are about to sign the preliminary sales agreement, but someone has told you that the SAFER is going to pre-empt and prevent your project from going ahead. Don't panic! The risk is not that high, and there are almost certainly solutions you can put in place.
Let's go back to basics to understand how the right of pre-emption and the SAFER work.
The right of pre-emption is a right granted to a body, usually a public one, to purchase a property (to substitute itself) in place of the buyer initially named in the contract. For example, municipalities very often have a right of pre-emption over property sales, which allows them to control transactions within their boundaries.
The purpose of this right of pre-emption is therefore to implement a public policy and to control, at least in part, private transactions.
The SAFER (Société d'Aménagement Foncier et d'Etablissement Rural – Land Development and Rural Settlement Company) is a private body entrusted with a public service mission by law. The SAFER is organised as separate companies in each French region.
According to article L141-1 of the Rural and Maritime Fishing Code, the SAFER must fulfil 4 missions:
To carry out its missions, it has been given legal tools, including the right of pre-emption. This right was granted to it in order to prevent speculation on agricultural land and to limit the price of agricultural land.
This right applies only to agricultural property: land, farm buildings, houses in agricultural zones, etc.
For more details, you can consult the presentation produced by the SAFER itself.
When a preliminary sales agreement is signed for agricultural property, the notary sends a notification to the SAFER setting out the terms of the sale: the seller, the buyer, a description of the property sold, the sale price, etc.
The SAFER then has 2 months to act. If nothing has happened by the end of the 2 months, this means the SAFER is not pre-empting.
Since Law No. 2026-796 of 18 August 2026, two new provisions have changed this stage. Firstly, when a sale includes both pre-emptable property and non-contiguous property that is not pre-emptable (a house and land located some distance away, for example), the notary must send two separate notifications, each with its own price, and each constitutes an independent pre-emption procedure. Secondly, the SAFER may now request to inspect the property: the 2-month period is then suspended until the inspection takes place or until the owner refuses, and the SAFER has at least one month from that date. In practice, the period of uncertainty can therefore last up to 3 months.
During these 2 months, the SAFER examines the file. It passes it on to the local land adviser, who will review the proposed sale, look at the price in relation to customary prices, check whether other buyers might be interested and whether they have priority, contact them, etc. After this review, if the adviser is considering pre-emption, they submit the file to a Technical Committee, which then decides whether or not to pre-empt.
Note that the SAFER also has a similar right over sales of woodland and forests in the Ile-de-France region.
Yes. When the SAFER pre-empts, it does not do so against a candidate but in favour of another candidate who has priority.
One of the SAFER's missions is to encourage the setting-up of young farmers and the transfer of agricultural holdings.
The orders of priority are defined by law and by regional regulations. Each region draws up a Regional Master Plan for Agricultural Holdings. This is the document that sets the priorities for the Structures Control. The SAFER pre-empts if it considers that a priority buyer should purchase the property rather than another.
Once the SAFER has notified the notary of its decision to pre-empt, it then looks for candidates to whom the property can be allocated. It publishes an official notice about the property. Anyone interested can apply by completing an application file setting out their project.
The land officer in charge of the file then summarises the applications, reviews the financing arrangements and submits the file to the Technical Committee, which gives an opinion on the resale. This decision is then passed on to the Board of Directors, which takes the official decision.
The Government Commissioners, who represent the State, then approve the decisions taken by the Board of Directors. The Government Commissioners are representatives of the ministries responsible for Agriculture and Finance.
Note that once the pre-emption decision has been notified to the seller, the seller cannot withdraw the property from sale. They are then obliged to proceed with the sale, but to the SAFER.
Yes. Pre-emption and resale decisions are administrative decisions that can be challenged in court and may be annulled.
There are in fact a great many cases of litigation against SAFER decisions, with both favourable and unfavourable outcomes.
The SAFER Technical Committee is made up of representatives of various organisations, divided into 3 different colleges:
Agricultural organisations: Chamber of Agriculture, representative farmers' unions (FDSEA, Jeunes Agriculteurs, Confédération Paysanne, Coordination Rurale, etc.), mutual banks and insurers
Public authorities: regional and departmental councils, mayors' associations, etc.
Others: Services and Payment Agency, environmental protection associations, landowners' and forest owners' unions, chamber of notaries, etc.
The presence of agricultural representatives within the SAFER gives the land officers an important network of informants in the countryside.
When the SAFER considers that a transfer is taking place at an abnormally high price compared with the market price, it may decide to pre-empt with a price revision.
In practice, it notifies the notary that it wishes to exercise its right, but at a price lower than that set out in the preliminary sales agreement. It must justify its decision by proving that the proposed price is higher than the average prices charged.
But it cannot impose this price on the seller. The seller then has 6 months to make a decision. They have 2 options:
The SAFER has its own data on the agricultural land market. To find out the market value of a plot of land before a possible pre-emption, our land price observatory is a useful complementary source: based on DVF data (actual recorded transactions), it gives access to average and median prices and transaction ranges for each department. In 2024, the national average price is €6,038/ha, but the gap between departments reaches a factor of 10x (Saône-et-Loire: €2,400/ha vs Var: €24,000/ha).
Since 2014, the SAFER has been able to pre-empt only part of the property sold – in practice, the agricultural land – and leave the rest (dwelling house, buildings with no agricultural use) to the buyer. The seller then has 2 months to either require the SAFER to purchase the whole property, accept the partial pre-emption while claiming compensation for the loss in value of the remaining property, or simply accept it outright. As the SAFER can neither finance nor resell a house unconnected to a farm, the requirement to purchase the whole property led it to withdraw in the vast majority of cases.
The law of 18 August 2026 changes the situation for non-contiguous property: land that is not adjoining the house is the subject of a separate notification and can be pre-empted on its own, without the seller being able to require the purchase of the house. For a house and adjoining land, nothing changes. Listed or registered historic monuments and remarkable gardens benefit from an exception. We explain the mechanism, its limitations (the law does not define contiguity) and its consequences for the seller and the buyer in our article Partial SAFER pre-emption: what the 2026 law changes.
The SAFER has been designated by the Sempastous Law to carry out the control provided for by the Sempastous Law, which aims to combat the grabbing of agricultural land through partial transfers of shares in agricultural companies.
The SAFER now receives almost no subsidies and is paid through fees that are added to the purchase price for the beneficiary of the resale.
However, to avoid pushing up the bill too much, transactions carried out by the SAFERs are exempt from registration duties. The cost of its intervention is therefore at least partly covered by savings on acquisition costs.
According to the SAFER's own figures, in 2020 the SAFER carried out 1,240 pre-emptions, i.e. only 0.4% of the 322,400 proposed sales notified to it! The risk of pre-emption is therefore actually very low.
If you are buying a farm, an equestrian property, a wine estate, etc. that includes buildings, land, a house, etc., the risk of pre-emption of the whole is low, because the SAFER will find it quite difficult to find a competing buyer with priority. Be careful, however: since 20 August 2026, land that is not contiguous with the house is notified separately and can be pre-empted on its own. If the value of your purchase depends on plots located away from the dwelling, the risk relates to those plots, and it must be dealt with in the preliminary sales agreement (a condition precedent linking the lots).
If your purchase concerns only a few hectares of land, the risk of pre-emption will be higher, because many neighbouring farmers are likely to be interested in these plots.
One way to avoid pre-emption by the SAFER is to anticipate, and therefore to understand the local context. Contact the SAFER, introduce yourself and make the case for your project. The local officer may be able to tell you how to structure your project and move up the order of priorities.
In fact, it is often the SAFER's land officer who contacts the buyer or seller of a property, even before notification, to inform them that the SAFER is considering pre-emption on the file.
You can also get in touch with your potential local competitors and try to reach an agreement so that they do not apply.
If a project slips through your fingers, you will very probably have new opportunities to acquire agricultural property in the months and years to come. A great many farmers will be ceasing their activity in the coming years, freeing up numerous farms and plots of land.
You now have a real understanding of what the SAFER is and of its right of pre-emption, and therefore the keys to making the right decisions in your purchase project. Feel free to consult all our articles on buying a farm for further information.
