The real estate sector is closely linked to the needs of the regions in housing, offices and businesses which, like hotels and the healthcare offer, make them particularly attractive.
After ten uninterrupted years of growth, the sector led by the activities of production and property development, real estate transactions and property management, was hit hard by the economic crisis in 2013, returning to a situation comparable to that of the nineties.
But despite the taxation of real estate transactions, and after the adoption in 2014 of the law for Access to Housing and Renovated Town Planning (“Alur” law), new and old properties on the real estate market are experiencing a recovery which shows every sign of being long lasting. In fact, the market for older properties has regained its fluidity with the combination of a fall in rates and an increase in the volume of transactions, returning to the average for the years before the crisis. A margin of increase of 3% remains compared to 2012.
For social housing, the Ministry of Housing and Social Housing had recorded a demand of more than 1.9 million at the end of 2015, in many cases concentrated in Ile-de-France and Rhône-Alpes. Excluding ANRU (French national agency for urban renewal) operations, the number of approved social housing units in mainland France was 109,000, up 2.3% from 2014. By including the Overseas Departments and ANRU urban renewal operations under specific schemes, the total number of social housing units was 125,000.
The cross-cutting approach of private and public business law is essential to the functioning and dynamics of real estate and social housing, a sector driven by developers, institutional, private and financial investors, the CDC (association of municipalities), local authorities and local public institutions, asset management, property companies, insurers and estate administrators.
