Richer in real‑estate wealth, short on liquidity: why partial sales are arriving in France

Column by Martin Iscovici OBEN November 10, 2026 2:37 p.m. French housing is worth almost three times GDP, but banks are lending less and less. The Civil Code already provides solutions, but almost no one implemented them.

The French have considerable real estate assets, but they cannot use it without selling their homes. At the end of 2024, according to INSEE, housing and land held by households were worth nearly 8,700 billion euros, or almost three times the wealth produced by the country in one year. It is one of the most important private real estate holdings in the world. It is also the largest share of what the French own: real estate represents 61% of household assets.

This heritage is explained firstly by French real estate credit, which is an exception in Europe: 97% of loans signed in May 2026 are at a fixed rate, that is to say that their rate does not change during the entire repayment period, which can go up to twenty-five years. For decades, the French have bought knowing in advance the exact amount of their monthly payments, which is rare elsewhere. They are also very attached to property: 57% of households own their main residence, and this is the case for seven out of ten households after the age of 70. Finally, France remains the most visited country in the world, with 102 million foreign visitors in 2025, which helps maintain the attractiveness of its housing stock.

But this heritage has a limit: as long as you do not sell your real estate, you cannot use the money it represents. A retired couple who live in a 400,000 euro house with 2,000 euros in pension per month are rich on paper, and yet they must pay attention to every expense. A woman who is divorcing would like to buy out her husband's share to keep the house: the bank refuses, even though half of the property already belongs to her.

When you need money, the first instinct is to go to your bank. However, it lends much less than before: according to the Banque de France, the amount of real estate loans granted each year was halved between 2022 and 2024. It rose again in 2025, to 146.7 billion euros, but remains a third lower than its 2022 level. The rules of the High Financial Stability Council have a lot to do with this: as a general rule, a bank cannot grant a loan whose monthly payments exceed 35% of the borrower's income, nor whose duration exceeds twenty-five years. By 2023, the Meilleurtaux observatory estimated that almost one in two applications could no longer obtain a loan.

Machine-translated from French