20 years' salary to buy Paris flat
Estate agent's survey compares cost of buying 56m2 apartment in French capital with average salaries
DO YOU dream of owning a home in Paris? It could cost you as much as 20 times your annual salary, according FNAIM estate agents.
Despite falling prices in the capital over the past two-and-a-half-years, property prices in the French capital remain high.
So far, this year, prices have dropped between 1% and 5% in 17 arrondisements.
But the cost of buying a home in Paris means that many city dwellers have to commit three to four times more of their salary than people living in other parts of the country.
A 56m2 apartment - the average size of a property in Paris - in the Fourth arrondissement would set back an average buyer more than 20 years’ income.
The trend is similar in five more of Paris’s most central arrondisements - with properties of the same size priced at a level consistent with 18 years of average incomes. Price-to-income comparisons range between 11 and 18 years for other areas of Paris, including suburbs like Neuilly, despite falling prices and activity levels on the housing market generally being at its weakest for a decade.
FNAIM calculated the property buying-power of Parisians by taking into account average incomes in each arrondisement and in several other towns across the Ile-de-France.
Further out, prices fall further. In Saint-Ouen the comparison amounts to 10.8 years for a 56m2 property, while in Plessis-Robinson its 7.9 years, and on the borders of Ile-de-France it drops to five years.
