librarising

I posted on this thread back in May with some observations about our flat in Nice and the way local agents were behaving, especially the agent we use to let the place furnished. Here's an update. I said that in May there were more properties in the windows and on the websites, but that the asking prices were the same. Now there are plenty more properties up there, page after page of them. Our agent is advertising something like 7 or 8 times as many properties for sale as they were a year ago. Also I would say the asking prices are about 10% lower today. I know of one flat in our block that sold about a month ago. Don't know the price, but if any of you know of a place where I can look it up I will do so and comment on the price achieved. One interesting this is about rentals. Our agent does quite a lot of letting (this may be why he's still in business). Our tenants have been there for about 18 months. No rent increase was suggested this year - and no rent cut either for that matter. But the agent is advertising hardly any properties for rental. I had a look around and I would say that this seems to be reflected elsewhere. Not so many rental offers on pap.fr either. So demand is strong in the rental market in Nice? Maybe a local might confirm this? If it's true, I wonder why?

Interesting thread. It seems the world is waiting to see how far prices will fall, including even the phlegmatic (property-wise) French. Here's my experience in case you're interested: We bought a flat in Nice three and a half years ago. Asking prices have appreciated about 40% since then, and remain steady. Nice is both a working city and a holiday destination with little room to expand, and prices have been pretty high there long-term. In the last few months I have noticed many more properties appearing in agents' ads. Like about a four-fold increase. This may partly be simply because agents are feeling nervous (if not desperate) and so are working harder - a feature of the French property market is that properties for sale appear in many agents' adverts, as I think there's to some extent a free-for-all once a property is advertised. They get 4-5% on sales! Flats in Nice have in the time I've been looking generally tended to stay on the market for a good while before sale, but I've seen a few that have been up for six months or more, and new ones keep appearing. So Nice is worth watching as a traditionally quite steady market under some downward pressure. It will be interesting to see how far prices eventually yield to this. Rents in Nice by the way are quite high relative to non-Riviera locations... but are low relative to prices, and have not risen with the price rises I have mentioned. 800 euros a month will get you a quite nice spacious two-bed flat in Nice, just as it did four years ago - I wonder if this suggests some bubble qualities in prices? (for such a flat, typically about 280K euros is being asked now). Wages are not that high in Nice, though, and many lets are to students, which I think tends to keep rents steady. Our flat is let but we actually intend to live there eventually; I wouldn't recommend Nice as a buy-to-let opportunity at current prices. But then of course you'd have to be brave/foolish to buy any property anywhere just at the moment unless forced to by circumstances.