Olympic Games-2024: apartment sales are struggling to take off in the Olympic Village

The harvest is slim. Icade, the subsidiary of the Caisse des dépôt en consignations (CDC) which has built more than 640 housing units in the village and must sell nearly 240 at the end of the Games, has decided to put 88 apartments up for sale since the month of July. Result? “Around ten signatures”, assures an executive of the subsidiary on condition of anonymity. The developer recently announced that it had lowered its prices.

For Vinci, which put its homes up for sale at the end of June, the results are more flattering if we are to believe its website: 78 apartments have found buyers, but there are still around a hundred for sale. Difficult to have a precise count, the promoter, contacted by AFP, did not follow up.

“Plenty of time”

“It’s not much but they have plenty of time, the apartments must be available to buyers one year after the end of the Olympics, i.e. at the end of 2025, beginning of 2026,” explains a source close to Solideo, the company in charge to deliver the Olympic works which oversee the pharaonic construction of the Olympic village, capable of housing up to 6.000 inhabitants after the Paris Games.

The developers must in fact recover the housing when the Olympic flame has been extinguished in September. It will take them a year to redevelop and adapt them: as they stand, for example, the apartments delivered to the Paris-2024 organizing committee do not have a kitchen since the athletes will eat in the huge restaurant installed on time of the Games under the Cité du cinéma hall.

Of the 2.800 apartments planned to accommodate the 10.500 athletes, almost a third - or just under 700 - will be available for sale. The rest will be distributed between social housing, rentals and offices.

"Some developers have chosen to test the sales of their apartments well in advance, others will undoubtedly wait a little. But clearly, they had undoubtedly planned another context a few years ago", tries to explain a source within a company working for Solideo.

It is moreover this context of crisis hitting the real estate sector which mainly serves as an explanation for this sluggish entry into the matter.

For months, the crisis and the rise in rates have considerably slowed down real estate transactions, even more so in new construction "which has seen its sales volume drop by almost 30% in one year", assures Thomas Lefebvre, the scientific director of SeLoger and Meilleurs Agents, two sites specializing in real estate transactions.

“The market turned around very quickly, quite violently. We went from borrowing rates around 1% in January 2022 to more than 4% today. The buyers’ market has shrunk considerably,” explains Thomas Lefebvre.

“From El Dorado, we went to the Wild West, and it was difficult to imagine,” corroborates Sélim Mouhoubi, director of the Stéphane Plaza real estate agency in Saint-Ouen.

"Too expensive"

“They didn't market too early, they marketed too expensively. It's always a question of price,” assures this agency director. “There, they went to 6.900 euros per m2 (compared to 7.500 euros initially). Still 5 to 10% to reduce in my opinion. They must agree to do less,” he assures.

The sudden arrival of a new neighborhood in an environment previously made up of industrial wasteland, with no businesses yet established, and in complete transformation, does not necessarily help potential buyers plan. This area is still lifeless, except for the last workers busy in the buildings.

"The only problem today is the context. Otherwise it's not a bad bet to buy in this neighborhood, there will be shops, schools", anticipates Sélim Mouhoubi, who judges that "the attractiveness of this territory, with the transport that arrives, has no equivalent in Ile-de-France".

“We also have to see the Olympics effect, this district will certainly be highlighted,” predicts Thomas Lefebvre.