prices have almost tripled since 2000

This INSEE study is enough to please some owners: in mainland France, the prices of old housing have increased 2.6 times since 2000. Behind the national statistics, however, there are sometimes impressive differences, particularly between different territories.

Borrowing rates noted on 11/22/2024

The fractured Hexagon

Not all owners have benefited as much from the dynamic. The INSEE study, published this week, reveals a two-speed country. On one side, there is what is commonly called the “vacuum diagonal”. There we find departments like Indre, Creuse or Haute-Marne, with a median price for houses which still does not cross the barrier of €1,000/m².

Conversely, approaching large urban centers or tourist areas is a game-changer. On this same median price indicator, €3,000/m² has this time been exceeded. This is unsurprisingly the case for Île-de-France or Bouches-du-Rhône, but it is also the case in a perhaps more surprising way in Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Savoie.

Sales from single to eightfold

Concretely, in France, one house in ten is sold for less than €850/m². Opposite, one house in ten is sold for more than €4,360/m². The figures are even more pronounced for apartments: €1,350/m² on one side compared to €8,240/m² on the other. INSEE specifies that the gap between these extremes has seen a “clear increase during the 2010s”. Indeed, a dividing line is also emerging in the evolution of prices.

Over the last ten years, prices per m² in existing properties have increased on average:

• 1.4% per year for houses;
• 1.7% per year for apartments.

But at the same time, the segment of attraction areas of cities with more than 700,000 inhabitants experienced an average annual variation of 3%. The institute also recalls that the drop in prices observed since 2022, due to the rise in real estate rates, has “attenuated the overall growth of this ten years”.