France Property Market On A High

It’s shaping up to be another record year in the French housing market, reports Abode2, with record numbers of homes changing hands - exceeding the million homes in the year before the Covid pandemic.

Latest data from the Notaires de France, suggest that the property market has been kept buoyant by government efforts to absorb the shock of Covid, combined with low interest rates and a pandemic-induced movement of people towards more spacious homes in outer suburbs, small towns and villages.

In the last quarter of 2021, house prices rose by 7%. This statistic includes apartments, but not newbuilds.

As previously reported, for the first time this year, it’s houses rather than apartments that are pushing up prices and it’s the provinces that are seeing the biggest growth whereas traditionally it has been big towns and cities. The average price of Parisian apartments has actually dipped slightly – something previously unheard of and seemingly linked to the desire of homeowners to have more space and/or to work remotely.

However, it’s too much to talk of an ‘urban exodus’, say the Notaires. “This lockdown-linked trend mainly concerns a very specific and limited demographic with the personal and professional resources to move out to smaller communes,” says the report. “On the other hand, it may also concern people who are no longer able to afford to live in big urban centres.”