France

Overall construction activity

In 2019, the French construction activity’s growth slowed down slightly with an increase of 2.2% in volume, after a rise of 2.6% in 2018. Non-residential building and civil engineering were the main drivers in 2019. Housebuilding recorded a slight increase of 0.8% in 2019. Despite significant recruitment difficulties, employment in the construction sector rose strongly in 2019 with the creation of 40,000 new jobs.

Housebuilding

Due to the cut of some incentives since 2018, both permits and housing starts still show negative figures in 2019. In 2019, a drop in permits by 5.2% was recorded. Collective dwellings were strongly affected by the downturn, with a 10.4% decrease, mainly because of difficulties in the social housing sector (i.e. increase of the reduced VAT rate, lowering of collected rents with the reduction of subsidies, etc.). Conversely, the individual housing construction market recovered from mid-2019 onwards and recorded a growth of 1.9%, in line with the 5% upturn in individual housing builders’ sales during the year. Housing starts reached 408,000 units in 2019, which represents a 2.2% decrease compared to 2018, with opposite trends for collective and single dwellings. The latter segment rose slightly by 0.3% in 2019 while collective dwellings decreased by 4.1%. Finally, the housebuilding turnover showed some resilience in 2019, with a slight increase of 0.8% in volume. Lastly, in volume, the housing renovation and maintenance turnover remained rather stable in 2019.