Buying your home no longer means radically change your place of life. In reality, one move out of two involves 20 kilometers from home. And contrary to popular belief, it is not a major family event that most often triggers the purchase of a primary residence. This is what a Nestenn group study carried out among 586 buyers who completed a transaction over the last twelve months reveals: the first motivation cited is the search for a new living environment, at 30%, far ahead of a separation or divorce (7.5%), professional mobility (5.5%) or the arrival of a child (2.6%).
But what does a new “living environment” really mean? “It’s more quality of the good than location »explains Delphine Rouxel, president and co-founder of the Nestenn group. Garden, additional bedroom, larger living room, room dedicated to teleworking, brightness, calm, distance from the city center, better energy performance: criteria that follow the same logic. “Buyers are not looking to radically change their daily lives, but to live better where they already have their bearings »summarizes the expert.
A strong attachment to one’s living area
This search for a better life is rarely played far from home. Nearly half of purchases (47.8%) are made less than 20 kilometers from the previous accommodation, and more than a third (34.4%) in the same or a neighboring municipality. “Quite simply, in the majority of cases, buyers are satisfied with their living area”explains Delphine Rouxel. They have their habits with traders, an already known school network, but above all closeness with familyperhaps also their attending physician and their established sporting activities…
These local ties weigh more than the desire to start again elsewhere, as we felt during the Covid pandemic. At that time, there was a wave of households seeking to settle far from cities, marked by confinement. Delphine Rouxel, however, observes an opposite movement, still marginal: she begins to feel “a desire to resell to people who had left Paris to work in Orléans or Poitiers, who are looking to return”she notes, specifying that no statistics have yet confirmed this trend.
Teleworking, a criterion that has stabilized
Because in fact, teleworking has declined. Its growth in 2020 and 2021 had given rise to fears that large offices would be empty… But five years later, this scenario has not materialized, on the contrary. Many companies today impose a limit on teleworking. So, “the criterion of additional space, for an office, etc., was after Covid, less today”notes the expert. She notes a stabilizationalthough the criterion has not completely disappeared either: “We are not seeing a mass exodus as we feared at the time. » Some households have agreed to slightly expand their perimeter by a few kilometers from their place of work, but rarely to the detriment of their other connections. “Teleworking does not eliminate other ties such as school, family, friends”she emphasizes.
