Rental real estate market in France in 2023

I) Introduction

Welcome to my blog post that provides the latest statistics on the rental housing market in France for the year 2023. This post focuses on houses and apartments offered for rent in different regions of the country. So, if you are a tenant who is currently looking for a new place to rent or planning to move to a particular region of France from outside, you will find here the latest information from the “bird-view” perspective. If you look for insights only from Paris and Ile-de-France, you can check out this post.

I am using advanced data science tools and statistical analysis methods to provide valuable insights into key indicators such as rental prices and price per square meter across the country. These insights offer a comprehensive overview of the current state of the French rental housing market, helping tenants understand the trends and patterns that are currently present and help to achieve realistic expectations of the rental prices. Please, don’t hesitate, read on and make informed decisions about your next rental property.

During my free time, I like from time to time to build scraping bots that “crawl” across the internet, collecting data from various web portals. I find this process fascinating as it allows me to extract key information from the web and save it structured into spreadsheets or local databases. Once the data is collected, I then perform statistical analysis to gain insights and to explore the world through data. To build my scraping bots, I use the Python 3 library scrapy, which is a popular baseline library in Python 3 for web crawlers and scrappers. For post-processing, statistical analysis, and visualizations, I rely on the four of the most popular data science libraries in Python 3: numpy, scipy, pandas/geopandas, and matplotlib. These libraries help me to make sense of the data and present it on this blog in a way that is easy to understand. The latest data that I have collected for this blog article was pulled from the internet in December 2022.

II) Regional Rental Housing Market

Let’s begin to have a look first on the regions of France. The mainland France is divided into 13 regions. This can be seen in Fig. 1. From the available dataset I have build a median value for each region of the rental square meter price for apartments and houses. We can see that to rent one square meter of a houses is cheaper than an apartment. On the other side, houses have a much higher inhabitant square size,therefore their monthly total rent will be significantly higher compared to an average apartment in the same area.

The figure clearly shows that Île-de-France, which includes Paris, remains the most expensive area to live in France in 2023. Renting an apartment in this region costs an average of 23.1 €/m² per month, while renting an entire house costs 16.7 €/m² per month. The next most expensive area is the sunny Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, where the average cost per square meter is 17 €/m² for an apartment and 13.7 €/m² for a house. In contrast, if you’re looking for more affordable places to live in France, Grand-Est and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté are your best bet. Renting an apartment in these regions will cost you around 11 €/m² per month, while renting an entire house will be able at about 8.1 €/m² per month.

However, looking at the average price alone in a region provides only a partial picture. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, it’s important to consider the average distribution span of the rental costs in that region. That’s why in Fig. 2, I’ve provided a typical average range of square meter prices for apartments and homes for every region in France, where on the left side the data is ploted for apartments and on the right side it is plotted for houses.

To calculate this range, I used the entire data set for a given region and calculated three average values: the lower, upper, and total-average square meter prices. The lower average reflects the average of the square meter prices of the lowest 25%, while the upper average reflects the highest 25% of the regional dataset. In this calculation the average value is based on the median, not the mean. By taking into account the entire range of prices, this approach provides a more informative perspective on the rental market in each region.

As previously mentioned, Île-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and Corsica are the three most expensive regions to live in France, while Centre-Val de Loire, Grand-Est, and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté are the most affordable. It’s worth noting that the national average square meter price for apartments is currently (i.e. Dec. 2022) approximately 14 €/m², while the national average for houses is around 9 €/m² per month. These figures provide a useful benchmark for comparing prices across different regions and understanding how each region stacks up against the national average. Therefore, by considering both the average price and the typical range of prices, you can gain a more nuanced understanding of the rental market in each region of France. Armed with this information, you’ll be better equipped to make informed decisions about where to live and what to pay for your rental property.

Fig. 3 shows the statistical distribution of square meter prices across France and the most expensive region, Île-de-France. On the left side, the data is plotted for apartments, while on the right side for houses. Across the entire country, the square meter prices for apartments tend to stack up around 10 €/m², while the median of the distribution lays about 14 €/m². However, when focusing on Île-de-France alone, the square meter prices stack up around 18 €/m², with the median for the region around 23 €/m². This makes apartments in Île-de-France, on average, 65% more expensive to rent compared to the national average. A similar trend can be seen for houses on the right side of the plot. The national average for house rental prices is around 9€/m², while the average for Île-de-France is roughly 17 €/m², making it 88% more expensive to rent a house in this region. Understanding this kind of distributions of square meter prices in a particular region is useful in determining whether a specific rental property is fairly priced in its respective region.

The rental market in France varies greatly depending on the region. Île-de-France, which includes Paris, remains the most expensive area to live in France, while Grand-Est and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté are the most affordable. The average rental square meter price for apartments is currently around 14 €/m² across the country, while the national average for houses is around 9 €/m² per month. However, it’s important to consider the typical range of prices within a region to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the rental market. By doing so, one can determine whether a specific rental property is fairly priced in its respective region.

III) Apartment rental cost in large cities

Let’s focus solely on apartments in large French cities. In this post, a city is classified as large if it has over 100,000 inhabitants. Thus, Fig. 4 displays the average price per square meter for apartments in 40 large French cities, which were estimated using the same methodology as the methodology used to estimate data depicted in Fig. 2. The national average for apartments in large cities is 17 €/m², representing a 21% increase from the national average for apartments across the country, which is 14 €/m². The cities with the highest prices, far above the national average, are Paris and Boulogne-Billancourt, with more than 50% higher prices. In contrast, the most affordable cities are Perpignan and Mulhouse, with prices nearly 35% below the national average.

IV) Remarks on data acquisition and engineering

The data was gathered using my web crawler and scraper from various web portals that offer housing and apartments for rent throughout France in December 2022. The typical distribution of the collected data is depicted in Fig. 7. It is possible that these plots also correlate with the population density in France.

V) Conclusion

Knowing the statistical distribution of rental prices across France can help you plan your budget if you’re considering moving to a new region. For instance, if you’re planning to move to Île-de-France or another expensive region in France, you’ll need to account for the significantly higher rental costs in this region compared to the rest of the country. Conversely, if you’re moving to a more affordable region, you may be able to save more money each month or afford a more spacious property. Further, it helps you to understand whether a specific apartment or house is priced fairly or not. If the property you’re considering falls within the mid-average range, it’s likely priced reasonably. On the other hand, if the property is priced much higher than the upper average range, it may be overpriced.

In summary, understanding the typical average range of square meter prices in a region provides a more complete understanding of the rental market in that area, enabling to make more informed decisions about where to live and what to pay for your rental property.