The commercial court of the Cité des Ducs drew up a worrying assessment of the judicial liquidations in 2024, due to the sluggishness of the real estate sector and the commercial lethargy of the Nantes city center.
The boarded up windows and the sad appearance of certain streets in downtown Nantes set the tone. With 589 judicial liquidations, the judicial year 2024 was close to the historic record of 600 bankruptcies recorded in 2008, revealed on January 20, at its solemn back-to-school hearing, the commercial court of the city of the Dukes, competent over part of the Loire-Atlantique. The number of judicial liquidations there jumped by more than 50% compared to 2022, when only 376 closures were the subject of court proceedings, according to figures that Le Figaro was able to obtain. Same observation for judicial recovery, also on the rise for several years.
This assessment is a continuation of the difficulties that the city center of Nantes has been experiencing for several years, with a visible increase in the closures of small businesses and catering brands. The vacancy rate of vacated cells has also doubled in three years, going from 3% to 6% between 2021 and 2024, and prompting Teddy Robert, president of the association of traders and craftsmen in downtown Nantes, qualified in June for Le Figaro of a “mass effect”: “when there is an accumulation of closed businesses in the same place, it is always more difficult to quickly relaunch an activity there”.
Worrying indicators
As a result, the cases followed one another at an unprecedented frequency for more than 15 years, at the Nantes commercial court. “We have hearings with twenty-five files instead of around fifteen until now,” declared the president of the court, Patrick Darricarrère, according to our colleagues at Ocean Press while specifying that the increase in business bankruptcies in the sector remains less significant than the national average. For the vice-prosecutor Jean-Philippe Reverseau, cited by West France the 27% increase in orders for payment would also represent a “worrisome indicator” additional information on the local commercial situation.
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Aside from the national economic slump linked to the cost of energy or competition from digital platforms, more local issues would also have played a role in endangering Nantes businesses. Among these, the magistrates notably mentioned the increase in work in the city and demonstrations, particularly numerous – and sometimes violent – in 2024, due to the busy mid-year electoral calendar. “At each demonstration, we are surrounded by this ultra-left, totally dominant, who takes us hostage, we traders. It’s always the same thing, the State does nothing”testified a professional interviewed in June, the day before an anti-RN rally. Asked last summer on this subject, the elected representative of the city center district and business delegate Gildas Salaün assured that the city was “everything necessary to secure the routes, during each event”, adding that the damage attributable to the most exalted activists would be “difficult to quantify”.
The first sector to suffer from the economic numbness of the department nevertheless remains that of real estate, penalized in particular by the ban on renting thermal sieves or the increase in property tax. A little more than a third of the liquidations concern companies which have suffered from the crisis, both craftsmen as well as developers and architects. Due to a lack of social housing, and in order to reduce tensions among the most precarious residents, the elected environmentalists and communists of the Nantes town hall convinced their socialist allies in the majority to request the establishment of rent controls in the city of the Dukes. A measure that could be deployed before the end of the first half of 2025, in the event of a green light from the Minister of Housing, Valérie Létard.
