It was just after 7 p.m. on a Monday when staff at the Korian Les Amarantes nursing home in Tours, southwest of Paris, discovered 92-year-old Yvette Brisset dead in her bed. She had apparently choked on a madeleine — one of France’s famed scallop-shaped, lemon-flavored cakes.
The cake had been brought to her earlier that evening by a man named Alain Jousselin.
Jousselin, then 60, wasn’t a family member or friend. He was a former firefighter who had bought Brisset’s home 25 years earlier through a little-known French property scheme known as viager — and had been waiting ever since to move in, his lawyer, Abed Benjador, told CNN.
In a viager sale, elderly homeowners — often in their 70s, 80s or 90s — sell their properties at a steep discount, sometimes for half the market value. In return, they receive a monthly payment from the buyer. In most cases, they retain the right to live in the home for the rest of their lives — an arrangement known as viager occupé. In other instances, the vendor has already moved out at the time of sale, allowing the buyer to take immediate possession of the property while continuing the monthly payments — a setup known as viager libre.
It’s part real estate, part roulette. Property listings typically include the seller’s age alongside the asking price. The older the seller, the sooner the buyer might potentially claim the home.
