Presidential Candidates

Potential candidates who are leading the polls of the right-wing Republican party’s primaries, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, former prime minister Francois Fillon and Alain Juppe, are all going further, with pledges to abolish the wealth tax and ease other levies. According to an April 17 poll, the three right-wing candidates would receive at least 23 percent of the votes during the first round of the coming election, defeating the incumbent.

To be sure, politicians often don’t keep their promises: Hollande’s predecessor Sarkozy also claimed he’d scrap the wealth tax and lower real estate taxes, but never did.

Still, "there’s been a surge of optimism ahead of the election" as real estate investors anticipate lower taxes, said Philippe Menager, a luxury homes broker at Menager Hug. "The wealth tax has been extremely bad for the economy."

That optimism is feeding the French housing market’s recovery, underpinned by an improving economy and interest rates that remain near record lows. The nation’s economy is set to grow 1.3 percent this year and 1.7 percent next year, after a rate of 1.1 percent in 2015 and almost no expansion at all the year before, according to the European Commission.

Those factors, combined with the euro’s weakness, are luring foreign investors back into the market, said Roddy Aris, head of Paris for Knight Frank LLP. Buyers from outside of France, led by Americans and Britons, accounted for about half of all apartment purchases of more than 2 million euros last year, he estimates.

"Around the world, the word has spread: Paris is affordable," said Marie Ange de Charry, head of Paris-based real estate agency Lieux Particuliers. French expats “are longing to come back, and now they think the situation will change in 2017," she said.

More Construction

Improved sentiment is encouraging developers to build more, fueling competition for already-tight land in Paris’s historic center. Cogedim, the city’s biggest builder of luxury residences, built more than 600 apartments in Paris in 2015 and plans to complete about 20 percent more this year.

"This is due to our strategy, but also to the market and the returning confidence among buyers," said Christian Musset, head of Cogedim Vente.