French property market withstanding credit crunch

France will continue to be a good location for property investment this year, as the market has been relatively unaffected by the credit crunch.

That is according to Nick Dowlatshahi, managing director of Leapfrog Properties, who maintained that the French mortgage market had seen "no change" in lending capacity.

He contrasted this to the current situation in the UK, where he asserted that the credit crunch was "hitting quite hard".

Mr Dowlatshahi commented: "In France, they don't give buy-to-let mortgages or non-status or self-cert mortgages so they've had little of the effect of the credit crunch as opposed to the UK. They will continue to lend at 100 per cent and so on, there's no change in their lending capacity basically.

"You're not going to get [gains of] 20 per cent - you never know, you might get that in the occasional lucky town - but it's going to be steady."

He added that the French president Nicolas Sarkozy was bringing in many tax reforms which made it "much more interesting to invest in property than to rent".

Overseas Property News posted on 07/04/2008 10:45:07