Paris prime on the road to recovery

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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, reports Bloomberg.

“We really had 12 dreadful months between April 2012 and April 2013,” Charles-Marie 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.

Foreigners accounted for 7.7 percent of housing purchases in Paris in the first half, inching toward the record 8 percent in 2003 and 2008 and up from 7.3 percent last year, according to Paris notaires.