Many wealthy Americans are saying au revoir to the United States and bonjour to Paris.
Thanks to the current strength of the US dollar, Americans are buying up luxury properties in the French capital, causing prices to skyrocket, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The average price of a prime Parisian property (homes that sell for more than 3 million euros, or about US$2.9 million-HK$22.7 million-) jumped 9 percent in just the first half of 2022, according to the real-estate agency Barnes. In 2020, that average was 5 million euros, but this year it has been 5.47 million euros.
“Big fortunes were made in the US during the pandemic,” Hugues de La Morandière, an associate director at the real-estate agency Varenne, told Bloomberg. “Those people are now coming to Paris to buy homes.”
Many of them are opting to move to districts such as the 18th and 11th, which are less touristy than the areas around the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks. Still, some of those popular neighborhoods are attractive to Americans. In the Marais, for example, a third of Barnes’s sales to foreigners were to Americans. And near the Champs-Elysées, that breakdown was one in four.
In total, Barnes sold more prime Parisian homes in the first half of this year than in all of 2021, and it expects its 2022 sales to outperform the agency’s record-setting sales last year. A large part of that is due to American buyers, said Richard Tzipine, the agency’s managing director.
Varenne, the other real-estate agency, set its own record this year selling a townhouse in the 8tharrondissement for 27.5 million euros (US$26.8 million, HK$210 million) to a buyer who was French but made his money in the US. The sale also set a citywide record for price per square meter, with the buyer spending 50,000 euros per square meter (US$4,507, i.e. HK$35,320.2 per square foot).
The demand for luxury properties is in contrast with the larger housing market in Paris, which saw prices fall 1.4 percent in the three months through July, compared with the same period in 2021. The real-estate market in the City of Love is certainly on a wild ride this year. Mon dieu.
