Real estate property: beware of disgust

Free tribune

FNAIM is an action before the European Court of Justice by contesting the exorbitant prerogatives of SAFER in France. The latter could soon be empowered to intervene in the sale of a second home. Little by little, the right of property undergoes disconcerting erosion, judges Henry Buzy-Cazaux, founding president of the Institute of Real Estate Services.

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Certainly, FNAIM handles the judicial weapon very much these days. After having condemned the State for not having taken the decree of implementing the ALUR law of 2014 relating to the minimum aptitude before authorization for employees of real estate agencies, networks of agents and property administrators, the union brought an action before the European Court of Justice by contesting the exorbitant prerogatives of the SAFER in France. At the same time, moreover, a bill on the examination of the Parliament adds: if it is voted, it will in particular allow a SAFER thanks to the sale of a campaign house to force the fragmentation with a view to the preemption of part of the land, to prevent use for construction purposes.

This new trial inspires two observations. The first relates to the formation of public action and lobbying. It seems that influence on the government or parliament has passed to a harder method, which consists of using the judicial weapon. It is not known if it was first brandished towards the public authorities, who would have remained deaf there, and if the usual summons were made before the shot. Nevertheless, that at one point the tone and the means change. It’s unfortunate. For professional organizations who fail to make public decision -makers hear amicably, in good intelligence? Yes, no doubt. For the state that neglects to listen to the unions? Yes, it’s clear. Obviously, the contempt of President Macron for the intermediate bodies left traces and damaged their credit. It is deeply sad because the functioning of democracy is degraded.

Alteration of property rights

The second reading relates to the particular subject of SAFERs (land development companies and rural establishment). In reality, it is no longer specific and just constitutes a new form of the disturbing tendency alteration of property rights in France, and undoubtedly also of the dangerous attenuation of the boundaries between the private sphere and the public sphere. Two cancers whose country will not leave unscathed and that the legislator, more broadly political power, does not see coming. The second corresponds to an ancient trend to allow public law structures to encroach in the field of private companies. Worse, to indulge in this exercise with the encouragement of elected officials, whose armed arms they are, and which accentuate their grip on the market. It is a long time since the principle of deficiency of private initiative justifying public intervention is regularly flouted.

President Chirac had been necessary, shortly before the end of his second mandate, reminding the order of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, summoned to refocus on his sovereign missions when she had lost an untimely diversification. SAFERs transformed over time into real estate agencies specializing in country properties are an avatar of this poor confusion of genres. It can be regretted that the successive ministers of agriculture were not moved by this condemnable drift, partly occupied by higher causes to save our agriculture, undoubtedly encouraged to close their eyes by rural parliamentarians of weight.

The Safer soon empowered to intervene in the sale of a second home

The first problem is no less serious. Little by little, the property right undergoes disconcerting erosion. A fraction of these blows can be understood, in particular when the general interest is conditioned by obligations made to the owners who would not spontaneously assign these constraints. The fight against unworthy housing, sleep merchants, momentum towards the energy transition are of this order. In particular, the prohibition to rent energy -consuming housing can be admitted for this reason … as it can legitimately shock. The fact remains that the fight against climate change explains authoritarian public action, if it does not justify it. Other constraints, whose efficiency and even the objective are less clear, undoubtedly violate property rights and affect the attractiveness of property, by defecting the freedom of owners to have their property. This is the case with the Declaration on the Finance Site Manage my real estate, redundant with all reporting obligations. Ditto for the rent permit, the fruit of a commendable intention to eradicate the unworthy habitat, but only a hassle for the donors and ineffective to reveal the sleep merchants.

That the SAFERs are soon empowered to intervene in the sale of a second home and undo its consistency, to capture part of the land, is unacceptable, symbolically and really. What is this country where the owner of a house acquired for ages or inherited has no guarantee on his freedom to sell it as it is? The pre -emptive of part of the alienated goods was already a risk of size, with an acquisition price by the SAFER imposed by it and in general decorated. We would go much further with the future law: it has nothing less than the faculty for the SAFER to demand the disjunction between a house and its garden to allow the land to find agricultural use. The consequence would be violent as to the devaluation of the house. In addition, the bill extends to the coastal territories and to the tense areas the intervention of the Safer.

Divert ownership from the property

It would still be necessary that the state takes up the height and conceives that it is slowly but surely divert the French households of the property. The housing community quickly identified the disinterest in Emmanuel Macron for this link to real estate assets and its marked preference for use, without detention. He has neglected the constant taste of our compatriots, young and old, for property, with the exception of the most mobile and to say the whole of an intellectual elite called to crisscross the world to accomplish his professional destiny. Moreover, it is also a question of difference in methods of social recognition: the highest placed in the social hierarchy find elsewhere than in their accommodation the markers of their success. In short, and assuming that this ulterior motive is not limited to the President of the Republic, everything happens as if we wanted to guide the French towards other forms of placement, by multiplying the embarrassments and the perils attached to the real estate property.

However, at the same time the imperative to prepare your retirement by capitalization have never been so pressing and the property of its main residence or even a rental heritage are the most direct routes for households. We also know that the property reassures, in a universe without benchmarks for the most part, and that it stabilizes, even avoiding social movements … paternalistic employers at the beginning of the 20th century had understood this. The risk of disgust of property does not only weigh on the sector of activity concerned. He takes the consequence of a discouragement, a decline in individuals and families and a change of relationship to the country itself. The link to work, productivity, institutions, society and its large balances will be changed and to say all of Affadi. It is time in this regard that the state is gaining conscience and looks with other eyes to the property. Those of Chimène would be the most suitable.