New housing, old housing, to be built… The real estate market is experiencing a major crisis after that of Covid-19. New victim of the economic situation: building land. Indeed, the number of land purchased by individuals between October 2023 and September 2024 fell by 37% over one year, hampered by political measures limiting the artificialization of land, according to figures from Notaries of France published Monday.
In September 2024, notaries recorded 43,000 building land transactions accumulated over the previous twelve months, compared to 68,000 recorded between October 2022 and September 2023. Compared to the period from mid-2022 to mid-2023, sales of building land even collapsed by 43%. The building land market is suffering, like the rest of real estate, from the rise in borrowing rates and the high level of construction costs, which have put a stop to purchases of old housing and new construction.
A political, financial and spatial brake
Land sales are also hampered by certain political measures: the refocusing of the zero-interest loan on areas considered to be under pressure in terms of housing and collective housing, as well as the objective of “zero net artificialization” of land (ZAN) . The Superior Council of Notaries (CSN) underlines that “if the decline in the number of building land transactions was already well underway, its acceleration comes at the same time as the announcement of the exclusion of individual houses from zero-rate loans », measure which entered into force on January 1, 2024.
“These measures are based on laudable intentions”, but “they should not have the consequence of depriving and diverting people from accessing property”, worries Frédéric Violeau, responsible for national real estate statistics for the CSN.
As for the average price of land, it more than doubled between 2000 and 2008, then continued to increase to reach 84,100 euros in 2024. At the same time the average surface area of plots acquired shrank between 2000 and 2015 and began to increase again. from 2020. In 2024, the average surface area of a building plot purchased is 920 m².
France
