The year 2023 will remain an enigma for real estate professionals. The fall in activity, which resulted in a multitude of properties displayed in agencies for several months without finding buyers, did not lead to the logically expected drop in prices.
The main agency network in terms of number of transactions, Century 21 published, on Monday January 8, an edifying report: the number of real estate transactions fell by 16% in 2023, but the average price per square meter of houses only fell by 1.7% over twelve months, and that of apartments, by 3.4%. “Prices did not align as we thought. I was mistaken “recognizes the president of Century 21 in France, Charles Marinakis, who anticipated an adjustment of 10% “to make households a little more solvable”hit by the sharp and rapid rise in interest rates throughout the past year.
The slight decline in prices at the national level “is also misleading, because if we exclude the Paris region, real estate prices only fall by 1% in the rest of Francespecifies the brand, far from the 10% to 15% drop necessary to revive the market”.
The real estate group estimates that the market should end 2023 with a number of transactions of between 850,000 and 900,000, far from the peak recorded in mid-2021, of 1.2 million acquisitions made over a rolling year (between August 2020 and August 2021).
Resistance from sellers
“The sellers have put themselves in a waiting position for three reasons: they do not want to make a theoretical loss in value by selling their property below what it was worth eighteen months ago; they do not want to give up their current credit taken out at a rate close to 1% to buy another home with a credit of more than 4%; and in case they do not want to immediately make a new acquisition, they know that there is nothing to rent currently in the attractive territories”analyzes Charles Marinakis.
In this difficult context for buyers, the share of retirees increased by 7% in one year among buyers. “They are generally little or not affected by the tightening of borrowing conditions and often benefit from a significant personal contribution due to the resale of their previous property”, we explain at Century 21. A key indicator of the effort required to become an owner, the personal contribution today represents on average 37% of the acquisition amount. A new level.
However, resistance from sellers was less strong in Paris. The price of properties sold in the Century 21 network fell by 5.5% in 2023 compared to 2022 (to 9,774 euros per square meter on average, well below the symbolic threshold of 10,000 euros). Despite this drop, apartments have had difficulty selling, as evidenced by the explosion in sales times (+16 days in one year), which now reach 96 days on average, “levels never observed before”.
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