Making Sense of French Property Prices
8th March 2023
Property price data available on-line illustrates the difficulties of understanding the rural housing market in France.
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Whether you are a buyer or a seller, having a reasonable knowledge of housing market conditions is critical to determining your negotiating position and to being able to buy or sell at the best price.
Although there is a great deal of information available at a national level about interest rates, the economy, construction activity, and regulatory changes, in large measure housing markets are driven by local characteristics, making it essential to understand what is happening in your area.
In recent years, the French government have opened access to the French land registry, allowing everyone to see what properties sold for in each commune. The service is provided online at Demande de valeur foncière.
The information includes the sale price, date of sale, size of property, number of bedrooms, land area and plot (cadastre) number.
Using the data supplied by the land registry, several new websites offer analytical tools that attempt to make sense of this basic data.
One notable new arrival is Immovrai, which lists all sales by commune, figures which are then consolidated to give the average per m2 price of houses (or apartments) and the average price movement over a year, all of which is accompanied by an impressive number of graphs, maps and bar charts.
If your property search happens to be in an urban area, then it is unquestionably a useful resource.
In rural areas, however, the weaknesses of such data becomes evident. The low number of sales each year and the diversity of the housing stock, make it very difficult to use price data to either value another property or to establish the state of the housing market in a locality. The evolution in prices in adjoining communes varies wildly and cannot be accounted for by differences in the market.
Moreover, as it often takes many months for sales to be formally registered, none of the websites are able to offer information on recent sales. In some areas the latest sales recorded date back to 2021.
Details of the age or condition of the property are not given, so new-build sales are mixed with the sale of older stock, and tumbledown ruins with renovated homes.
Neither is there information on the level of supply and demand, figures that are not available on a consolidated basis from any source, but which are crucial to an understanding of which way the wind is blowing.
Around one-third of properties sold in France are sold privately, without the assistance of an agent, and the advertised sale price of such properties is determined by the seller. Several websites use advertised sale prices from private sellers and agents as the basis of their market analysis.
Even where an agent is used, with the number of estate agents having risen substantially over the past 10 years (many using self-employed sales agents), and exclusive instructions a rarity, the pressure on them to accept the often elevated sale price aspirations of their client is substantial.
As a result, determining the value of a property in the countryside is fraught with uncertainty. The paucity of rural house sales means estate agents have to use comparables from a wide area, but without also having some knowledge of the properties sold it is a herculean task. A recent research study found variations averaging 20% in the estimated sale value of a selection of properties valued by different estate agents.
Such is the heterogeneous nature of the rural housing stock in France that, like families, all properties are unique in their own way.
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