When a 44 million-euro ($59 million) Parisian townhouse near the Champs-Elysees was snapped up just six weeks after it was put on the block, Charles-Marie Jottras knew the city’s luxury property market was turning around.
The chairman of broker Daniel Feau, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate, says the firm found a Qatari buyer for the 19th-century mansion that features a dozen bedrooms on three floors, a terrace with a panoramic view of Paris, a swimming pool and a 1,000 square meter garden.
The re-emergence of buyers from the Middle East, the U.S. and Russia together with a more than 10 percent drop in prices in a year is rekindling sales of multi-million-euro properties in the French capital. The market faced a glut after wealthy French people, including actor Gerard Depardieu, sought to offload properties as they left the country, fleeing Socialist President Francois Hollande’s efforts to add to already high taxes since his May 2012 election.
“We really had 12 dreadful months between April 2012 and April 2013,” Jottras said in an interview. “Then the market woke up nicely thanks to falling prices. Foreigners are looking at France anew because they’ve realized that, at the end of the day, the tax hell is for us, not for them.”
While Paris notaries figures show the number of apartment sales in the capital in the first half of 2013 was 22 percent below the average of the past 10 years, such transactions rose 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier.
Depardieu’s Exit
Hollande unveiled 30 billion euros of new taxes for 2013 on companies and households -- including asking employers to pay a 75 percent tax on employees’ earnings of more than 1 million euros -- as he seeks to shrink a budget deficit that was 4.8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product last year.
At the end of 2012, Depardieu, who won the Golden Globe award for the best actor in 1991 for his performance in the movie Green Card, became the most high-profile tax exile, moving to Belgium before taking up a Russian passport in January.
He put his 19th-century hotel de Chambon mansion in central Paris up for sale, adding to the inventories of such properties listed for sale.
The total value of Daniel Feau’s listing swelled to 5.4 billion euros in the first quarter, up 42 percent from a year earlier, and has “slightly” trended lower since, Jottras said.