Buying an apartment or a house without owning the land and saving up to 40% compared to the private price: the "joint real lease", also known as BRS, has become a real craze in the middle of the housing crisis, five years after its launch.
With 40,000 euros of contribution, Beatrice, a 51-year-old Spanish teacher, could not afford to buy an apartment in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis) on her own. Thanks to the BRS, a new social home ownership scheme, she now owns a "71 m2 plus 14m2 in an attic" in Pantin, for 220,000 euros and a monthly fee of 175 euros.
"It's miraculous because it's 50% cheaper than in the private sector. I was not obsessed with the idea of buying at any price, but I already had a rent of more than 1,000 euros and I did not want to be a tenant for life without passing anything on to my children," continues this mother of two children, who borrowed over 15 years at a rate of 1,200 euros in monthly payments.
Resulting from the Alur law, the joint real lease implies the purchase of a piece of land by a joint land agency (OFS), a non-profit institution approved by the State. The OFS then resells the building - new or renovated - to a low-income household in exchange for a fee for the duration of the lease, which can be up to 99 years. In Paris, a single person must earn less than 33,400 euros per year to benefit from this scheme.
For the purchaser, the savings can reach 40% or more compared to the private sector, according to the Coop' HLM federation. At the end of the lease, the owner or his beneficiaries can either resell the property with a controlled capital gain or keep it by signing a new long lease, still subject to a means test.
"We are not at all used to this model in France, but property is not fragile at all, simply that we cannot speculate. It allows us to reach households that are totally excluded from home ownership so that they can live where they need to," observes Cécile Hagmann, general manager of the Coop' Foncière, which aims to sell 1,000 BRS homes in the Ile-de-France region by 2030.
The system "is constantly gaining momentum," says Tristan Ruiz, of the firm Adéquation. "We've gone from 2,000 homes put up for sale at the end of 2021 to 3,300 in the first half of 2022," he observes, with an average sale price "at 2,690 euros/m2." Most of these residences are located in the most tended zones, "historically initially in Brittany and in New Aquitaine, but one observes today a refocusing on Ile-de-France and in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur", specifies Mr. Ruiz.
It should be noted, however, that these sales remain marginal for the moment compared with the market for old houses as a whole. At the end of June, the notaries recorded 1.157 million transactions in the old during the last 12 months, that is to say approximately 96.500 sales per month.
Local authorities are particularly keen on the BRS scheme and are creating their own OFS to avoid excluding the most modest social categories from cities. The private sector is also very interested.
"Since the land is dissociated from the building when it is sold, one of the risks is to have speculation on the land. Owners should not sell their land at a higher price, thinking that they will always find a customer as soon as we can create a BRS and smooth out the price of land over 80 years," warns Marianne Louis, general delegate of the Union sociale pour l'habitat (USH), which represents social landlords.
Initially designed to meet housing needs in tense areas with a supply of new housing, the BRS has also found its use in certain rural areas, in the old.
This is the case in the Basque Country, where the local public land institution has used the tool to renovate vacant housing in town centers and bring back families who did not have the means to carry out the work.
