The portion of non-French people buying non-new build houses in the country is increasing.
In multiple departments, non-French buyers make up over 10% of purchases of non-new build houses (maisons anciennes), with only a handful of areas seeing the portion of foreign buyers decrease over the last 12 months.
The information comes from the end-of-year report from the French Conseil Supérieur de Notariat.
The report also covers which areas have seen prices drop the most, and the overall plummet in property sales in France in 2024.
Departments in the north of France have mostly seen the part of purchases by non-French people relative to overall purchases stay stable in previous years.
However, the amount of purchases by foreigners is up in almost all departments in the south compared to 2023.
The Haute-Savoie and Gers departments saw the number of non-French buyers of non-new builds as a portion of total buyers increase by two percentage points compared to the previous year.
It means 12% of non-new build property purchases in the former came from non-French buyers, just behind the Alpes-Maritimes, where 13% of purchases involve a non-French person.
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This is compared to 9% in 2021, a year that saw many areas of France see non-French buyers drop, partly due to the Covid pandemic.
Only a handful of departments, mostly those in the north-east, saw the portion of non-French purchasers drop in 2024. In the Creuse, this was by one percentage point.
The images below shows changes at a departmental level in 2019, 2021, and 2024. Grey shows the share of buyers dropping compared to the previous calendar year, and purple if the number has increased.
In departments shaded blue there was no significant change.
Conseil Supérieur de Notariat
The 2024 report did not detail which country buyers originated from, but last year the notaires revealed Britons were no longer the biggest group of non-French buyers.
The report also looked at the number of people from the Île-de-France capital region moving elsewhere in the country.
Numbers have stabilised following a mass exodus during the Covid pandemic, when almost all departments saw an increase in buyers from Paris and its surrounding areas.
However some departments, including in Brittany and Normandy, have seen numbers fall.
Conseil Supérieur de Notariat
Overall, property transactions are down 17% compared to the previous year, going from 935,000 in the 12 months to September 2023 to 780,000 in the equivalent period this year, the notaires stated in their report.
