At the end of the year, transactions will undoubtedly have fallen by 15 to 30% and even by 40% for new construction. Some professionals no longer hesitate to talk about a crash with ripple consequences.
Julie earns a good living, she has a contribution, a borrowing capacity. In short, the ideal buyer profile. She is looking for an apartment for herself and her two children in Pontoise, 25 km from Paris. But, between rising interest rates and still very high prices, it must revise its plans downwards.
“I think I lost between 13 and 20m2 in one year.”
Julie, potential buyerat franceinfo
“Since then, I have been looking for an apartment with a smaller surface area, that is to say I will find a bedroom for my children and I will have to settle in the living room. Julie thinks. Interest rates have increased from 1% last year to 4.5% today and the number of loans granted has collapsed: less 45% over the past year.
Construction and rental at half mast
And it’s the domino effect: the number of transactions plummets in the old market and it’s worse in the new market. Construction is the first part of real estate that faltered 18 months ago, notably with a striking bankruptcy filing, that of Maisons Phénix, a builder since the 1940s. Today, the entire sector is struggling. , according to promoter Norbert Fanchon, head of the Gambetta group. Usually, it builds 1,000 apartments per year. Not this year. “We are very far from it,” he said. We have a collapse, we can even use the word crash, of demand. We are at -40% compared to our objectives. In April, we had four commercial launches, that is to say we put projects up for sale, and we did not make reservations. No buyers. We have people who come to inquire but do not sign the reservation contract. There are therefore operations that we will abandon and consequently, housing that will not be built.”
“I think that at the professional level, we are going to lose 70,000 homes in 2023 alone, because there are no customers in front.”
Norbert Fanchon, chairman of the board of directors of the Gambetta groupat franceinfo
If it is not easy to access property in both new and old properties, the repercussions also hit the rental market. In Laval in Mayenne, Flora Capet, rental advisor at Century 21, receives more and more requests and sees the market gradually seizing up. Outgoing tenants simply no longer leave. “We had a lot of people who wanted to buy and in the end, several notices were canceled because the bank refused financing, she explains. Result: there is much less turnover.”
Interest rates not about to fall
And the shortage is unlikely to improve with thermal strainers gradually withdrawn from the market and accommodation transformed into Airbnb. “We hardly even put ads online for houses and we rent with our tenant baseconfides Flora Capet. Word of mouth means it sells out very quickly. We finish the visit and within ten minutes, we generally have a favorable response.”
Flora’s boss, Morgan Dréano, however, does not seem particularly worried. He is at the head of six agencies in Mayenne and Ille-et-Vilaine. According to him, “we have to be patient and work with sellers so that they understand that the buyer can no longer buy at the prices of a year and a half ago. It’s falling. Slowly but it’s falling, around 5- 6% so it’s being regulated. Today, there is no real estate crisis. There are more than a million sales in France. That doesn’t worry me.” So, crisis, crash or simple readjustment after the real estate madness of the Covid years? If professionals have divergent opinions, they do however agree on one point : interest rates are not about to fall, on the contrary, and there is a chance that 2024 will still look a lot like 2023.