PARIS, Feb 04 (Reuters) -- House prices have fallen sharply in major cities across France over the past year. However, in January this year, house prices in some large cities, including Paris and Bordeaux, stopped falling within a month, and prices in Rennes, Lyon, Strasbourg and other cities even began to rise, which has not been the case for a long time. It is too early to tell whether this trend will continue, but it is not ruled out that house prices will continue to stop falling and recover.
[Housing prices in many places in France rarely stop falling!]
According to the latest real estate barometer published by the BFMTV business channel and the real estate platform Bien'Ici, house prices in many large cities in France have stopped falling, at least in the last month. But it will take a few months to tell whether this is a real trend or a temporary lull.
Of course, prices per square meter in the real estate market across France have been falling significantly over the past year, but in January 2024 house prices in several major cities have stopped falling compared to December 2023, according to BFMTV News Channel.
For example, prices in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux have not changed in a month, which has not been the case for a long time. Similarly, house prices in Lille fell by 0.2% in a month and in Montpellier by 0.3% in a month, a decline that was almost negligible. In some cities, house prices even recovered slightly, such as Rennes by 0.4 per cent during the month, Lyon by 0.4 per cent and Strasbourg by 0.1 per cent.
There could be several reasons for this. First, in general, prices are now stabilizing in cities where prices have fallen sharply. For example, house prices in Paris fell by 6.7% from an average of €11,792 per square metre in September 2022 to €11,000 currently. Second, mortgage rates are stabilizing after a sharp spike in 2023, with some banks even cutting rates slightly, which has a decisive impact on most buyers' budgets. Thirdly, sellers are more inclined not to change the price advertised on the sale of the property, even if it means subsequently giving buyers a larger discount. These actual transaction price figures (as opposed to the advertised prices) are not yet known and will be published by the notary public in a few months' time. Finally, it is important to know that real estate sales are seasonal, with most sales taking place in the fall of spring, early summer, September to October, and the winter market is "dormant", which can have an impact on prices.
For now, buyers don't need to worry too much. A price trend in a month is not necessarily a real trend, and it is very likely that house prices will fall sharply again later on, so it will take a few months to determine if the real estate market is facing a real price decline.
At the same time, if you look at the market from a longer-term perspective, more than half of France's large cities have seen house prices fall in the last year. For example, in January 2024, house prices in Marseille fell by 1% year-on-year, Rennes and Dijon by 1.8%, Toulouse by 3.4%, Nantes by 4.4%, Paris by 5%, Lille by 6.1%, and Lyon by 7.9%.
Conversely, there are some cities where house prices are very strong. House prices rose 7% in a year in Calais, 4.4% in Caen, 4.1% in Boulogne-sur-Mer, 2.6% in Le Havre and 1.7% in Nice. This shows that the attractiveness of the southern and northwestern coasts of France has not diminished.
The report notes that the French real estate rental market remains very tight, with rents continuing to rise and properties available for rent on the market becoming increasingly scarce. Despite the fact that more and more cities have imposed rent caps, a surge in rents is inevitable. Between January 2023 and January 2024, only four major cities saw a decrease in rents. During this period, rents increased by 26% in Calais, 20% in Boulogne-sur-Mer, 16% in Villeurbanne and 16% in Paris. As a result, the crisis in the rental market seems to be getting worse.
[Mortgage disbursement is at its lowest level in eight years!]
According to the Bank of France, although mortgage rates are starting to stabilize, new mortgages issued in 2023 are only 129.5 billion euros, the lowest level in the last eight years.
According to Agence France-Presse, the Bank of France pointed out that 129.5 billion euros of new housing loans will be issued in France in 2023, and the last time such a low level is back in 2015, when mortgage interest rates were low, and 120 billion euros of housing loans were issued throughout the year.
However, the Bank of France noted that mortgage rates in France are stabilizing. In December 2023, the average mortgage rate for all maturities was 4.04%, "barely rising" compared to 3.99% in November, and "mortgage rates in some of our European neighbours have started to fall".
Although mortgage rates were largely stable in December 2023, mortgage disbursements continued to decline in the month to just €8.2 billion, the lowest level since December 2014. The last two years of higher mortgage rates in France, as well as banks' reluctance to make new loans amid slow wage growth and a slow decline in house prices, have contributed to the decline in demand.
Until March 2022, the average mortgage interest rate in France had been below 1.1%. However, the winds in the mortgage market have changed. Driven by the post-pandemic "catch-up effect" and the low level of interest rates at the time, there were previous "glory days", such as October 2020, May, June and July 2021, or April and May 2022, when more than €20 billion of mortgages were issued per month. However, since mid-2022, the European Central Bank (BCE) has initiated a policy of raising interest rates to curb inflation, causing mortgage rates to soar rapidly and households to reduce their borrowing capacity.
According to the report, outstanding mortgages in France remain at a high level of nearly 130 billion euros, double the level 15 years ago. The average borrowing term for borrowers buying a primary residence in France is 23 years, and for first-time home buyers (half of the borrowers), the average term is 23 years and 7 months.
[Police staff suspected of selling residences, claiming that they "just wanted to help them"]
Fatima L, the former head of the Foreigners' Service Unit at the Boulogne-Billancourt police station in the Hauts-de-Seine (92 department) in the Paris Region, is suspected of profiting from the illegal issuance of dozens of residence permits (titres de séjour) and récépissés (récépissésés) to foreigners during her work. On the 2nd of this month, she explained her operations between 2015 and the summer of 2018 in the 15th Chamber of the Criminal Court of Nanterre, Hauts-de-Seine.
Fatima, 57, was sentenced to three years in prison, including a two-year suspended sentence, and asked to pay a fine of 20,000 euros, for allegedly reacting corruption and fraudulently modifying data in the residence permit processing system and allegedly wrongly issuing dozens of residence permits and receipts to foreigners who did not meet all the conditions. In addition, the intermediary, Saad C, is on trial on suspicion of active corruption.
In 2017, lawyer Hakima Slimane accompanied nine of her clients to the Cergy police station in Val-d'Oise (95). Nine people recounted the same experience: when they applied for a residence permit, a staff member of the Boulogne-Billancourt police station deceived them. The plaintiffs, mainly from Tunisia, explained that in order to obtain this residence card showing Belgian or Spanish nationality, they paid an average of 13,000 euros, giving 9,000 euros first to ensure the establishment of documents and obtaining an appointment at the police station, and another 4,000 euros after the residence permit was issued.
They claim to have given the money to an intermediary named Saad, who had links to Fatima, a staff member of the Foreigners' Service Unit at the Boulogne-Billangu Police Station. Saad admitted that he was an entourage, commissioned by an African person to pick up the documents that had already been made in an Internet café in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, and then to go with the people who were applying for residency to the Boulogne-Billancourt police station or the Nanterre police station.
Although Saad has now acknowledged these facts, he previously denied knowing Fatima during the investigation, claiming to have no contacts with the police. However, among those who were granted fake residence permits, several recognized Fatima, the head of the Reception Office of the Foreigners' Service of the Boulogne-Billancourt police station, from photographs provided by the Hauts-Seine police, and no doubt that she sometimes arranged for them to meet at Le Monte-Cristo, a shisha bar in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, to reassure them about the progress of their applications.
Fatima admitted that she often went to this shisha bar, but explained that the manager was a friend of hers and that she did not go there to meet with Tunisian citizens who were applying for a residence permit. However, during the search by investigators, several plaintiffs' documents were found in her home. Fatima also argued that the documents were not intended to commit any fraud and that "I wanted to help some people." Given my position, I am often asked (to do these things). It is reported that Fatima has been suspended since July 2018.
Fatima assured that she finally decided to "offer her services" to these people, which she did free of charge and without receiving anything in return, simply "for humanitarian reasons". She added, "I've never taken money from anyone, not even a plane ticket, perfume or bag. To this day, my financial situation is still terrible. Fatima's lawyer, Samia Maktouf, called for the release of her client, stressing that "we don't even know where the so-called money has gone on this issue." ”
Bruno Mathieu, a lawyer for the Hauts-de-Seine Police, accused the defense of denying the facts, "in this story, the scam itself does not hold water." There are fake invoices, fake addresses and a lot of inconsistent information in the documents. ”
Prosecutors pointed out that the documents were shoddy fakes, many of the copy-pasted things, very poorly made, indicating that they were made by the same counterfeiters. The two defendants in this case are certainly not the only ones involved in the operation, but in this matter they are "the real gravediggers of public service". The prosecution has also requested that the accused be barred from public service, which is currently under consideration and will be decided on 29 February.
[From July, natural gas prices will rise by 5.5% to 10.4%]
From July this year, gas bills in France will rise again, this time in relation to the rising costs of the transmission network, but by how much?
According to a report by the French information channel on the 4th, the disaster is not a single line, after the French regulated electricity price has risen since February, the price of natural gas will also rise from July 1. Specifically, on average, households that use natural gas for heating will have a 5.5% increase in their monthly bills, or 7.3 euros more, and households that only use natural gas for cooking or hot water will have a 10.4% increase in their monthly bills, or 2.2 euros more.
Emmanuelle Wargon, president of the French Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), explained that the price increase is due to the rising cost of running the gas network, "in fact, the gas must be well delivered through pipelines, which must be maintained and when they fail, they must be replaced." She added that higher prices would benefit the energy transition, financing new biomethane infrastructure.
However, this increase is likely to have little impact on consumers, as it is part of the overall context of the decline in gas prices since the end of 2023. Fabien Choné, a French energy expert, said, "There is a good chance that the French will not notice the rise." ”
According to the report, the price of natural gas heating in France has risen by 70% since 2021.
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According to several French media, French international and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) striker Kylian Mbappé (Kylian Mbappé), who will transfer in the summer of 2024, has agreed to join Real Madrid at the end of this season with a contract with the club.
Several mixed vegetables sold at Leclerc supermarket in France have been recalled due to excessive pesticides. These include the Cœur de Jardin brand's mixed vegetables used to make cabbage soup, the brand's celery and chickpea mixed vegetables, and celery sold in bulk. These different products were sold at Leclerc supermarkets in some provinces from January 11 to 26, 2024, and the batch numbers can be found on the government recall website (Rappel Conso). If you have already purchased a product affected by the recall, you should not consume it and should instead destroy or return it to the point of sale. If you have any questions, you can call the hotline (05 53 98 36 36).
Provisional data provided to AFP by the French Ministry of Ecological Transition show that the number of building permits issued in France in 2023 is 373,100, a decrease of 115,900 or 23.7% compared to 2022. At the same time, the number of new housing starts fell by 22% in a year to 287,100 units. There are a number of factors behind this decline, including tighter mortgage conditions and rising construction costs. The Confederation of the French Construction Industry (FFB) warned in December 2023 that the market was approaching its all-time low of 1992-1993 (275,000 units) and that it was expected to continue to decline by 5% in 2024.
【International】
- Provisional data from Germany's National Statistics Office (Destatis) showed that the unemployment rate remained stable in January 2024, holding steady at 5.8% in January, the same level as in December 2023, despite sluggish economic conditions in the eurozone's largest economy and its strong industrial sector taking a hit.
- Italy's unemployment rate fell to 7.2% in December 2023, down 0.2 percentage points in a month, provisional data from the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat). Among them, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24 fell by 0.4 percentage points to 20.1%, but remained at a very high level. In December, the unemployment rate for women fell 0.2 percentage points to 8.2 percent, well above the unemployment rate for men, which fell 0.2 percentage points to 6.4 percent.
- The unemployment rate in Portugal was 6.6% in December 2023, unchanged from November but slightly lower than 6.7% in December 2022, provisional data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) of Portugal. The unemployment rate among young people in the country rose slightly to 23.1 percent, but the unemployment rate for people over 25 years of age remained stable. The Portuguese government expects the unemployment rate to be 6.7% in 2024 and the Bank of Portugal expects it to be 7.1% in 2024.
- Brazil's central bank cut its policy rate by 0.5 percentage points to 11.25%, the lowest level in two years with inflation under control.