2023-09-05 17:08:28
And what had to happen, happened. The real estate market is slowing down very sharply, given the tightening of borrowing conditions with interest rates rising from 1% in January 2022 to 4% today, which excludes a growing number of households, in particular the young and less fortunate.
According to data published on Tuesday 5 September by Meilleurs Agents (SeLoger group), sales of existing properties should fall by 20% this year compared to 2023, to reach 890,000 transactions, i.e. their 2014 level. In 2021, a record had been reached with 1.2 million operations. This shows the extent and speed of the tumble.
On the price side, the decline has clearly begun. «The fall in prices is on average 0.4% over the last twelve months, at the national level. This may not seem like much, but it hadn’t been seen for seven years, and over the whole of 2022 prices were still climbing by 6.2%underlines Thomas Lefebvre, the scientific director of Meilleurs Agents. Today, they are down in more than half of the cities, and no market segment is immune to this slowdown, including rural areas. »
The Parisian square meter below the 10,000 € mark
The case of Paris is somewhat symbolic of this trend, even if it was slightly ahead of the others. The drop in prices per square meter has been 7.6% since July 2020, unheard of for twenty years. This summer, the square meter even fell below the €10,000 mark, to €9,944.
Evolution over one year of real estate prices in major cities. / Best Agents
In the north of the capital, prices are down 14% over one year, after having climbed 39% between February 2015 and July 2020, according to calculations by Meilleurs Agents. In large cities, the most significant declines are observed, where prices have risen the most in recent years. The decline reached 8.6% in Bordeaux over one year and 8.1% in Lyon.
According to Meilleurs Agents, the decline is not over and should continue beyond 2024, with a decline of 4% over the next twelve months. «Since January 2022, due to the rise in interest rates, the French have lost an average of 20% of real estate purchasing power. And the market still has to adjust,” says Barbara Castillo Rico, the director of economic studies.
The collapse of the rental market
In the meantime, this general slowdown in transactions has chain consequences for the entire sector. Those who can no longer buy no longer move. As a result, the rental market is in great pain: offers have fallen by 18% over the last eighteen months, says Meilleurs Agents.
The National Real Estate Federation (Fnaim) even evokes a fall of 34% since January. According to her, more and more lessor owners withdraw their property from the market, tired of all the constraints imposed on them, with in particular the headache of energy renovation and its untenable schedule. For the time being, the fight against thermal colanders is mainly leading to a drop in the price of the goods concerned, by around 5%, according to Meilleurs Agents.
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