Climate change's unavoidable effects are having an impact on real estate buyers - small and mostly psychologic at this stage.
Picture above : In Soulac, near Bordeaux, the Signal building. Built in 1970 when the seashore was 300 meters away, it has been recently deconstructed in early 2023 as the shore is now 10 meters away. Officially, about 30 square kilometers of land have disappeared in France over the past 50 years and at least 50,000 homes are expected to be affected by 2100.
I first heard about climate change having an impact on real estate transactions a few months back, at the start of the summer, when a colleague from the Lubéron area (north of Aix-en-Provence) told that he had lost two sales in early summer when two different foreign couples didn’t complete their planned purchases of vacation homers, citing the “terribly hot weather” as a reason. A few days ago, Zoe Dare Hall wrote in the Financial Time (paywall) about how digital entrepreneur Denys Chalumeau and his wife have just moved from Aix-en-Provence to northern Brittany because they could no longer stand the intense heat. So is climate change really have an impact here?
As it turns out, Mr Chalumeau’s decision was prompted by his wife developing an autoimmune disease that is made worse by intense sunlight, and his own fears about increased risk of forest fires. But I am sure he is aware that forest fires are now pretty evenly spread across all of France – including Brittany.
Reading the FT article and others, it seems to me that home buyers are increasingly worried about the now unavoidable effects of climate change – in an almost existential way. I understand, I tend to share the same worry. At the same time, things should be put in perspective.
Climate change is having a clear impact on sea levels, so I would imagine that it should worry home buyers – but it usually doesn’t as the most sought after properties on the seashore are still very much in demand despite insurance premiums shooting up in places like Florida. Psychology, I guess?
In the same manner, the flood risk in New York or Venice should have an impact – but it doesn’t. A few years ago customers of mine ended a property search in Camargue when they realized that all the very nice (and expensive) farmhouses they were looking at had been built on a swamp… Psychology again.
So, what conclusions should you draw? Obviously, if you have ever considered moving to southern Spain or Morocco and decided against it because of the heat, then you should rightly avoid the increasingly hotter south of France. Otherwise, my advice is to include climate change and its effects (heat, floods, insurance, fires, etc…) into your search criteria list and weigh the perceived impacts against all your other criteria – and see what comes out.
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