By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

In a stressed and saturated market like that of real estate, new trends are emerging.

Timidly – we can’t talk about massiveness yet – they appear in the offices of realtors and notaries, mainly older people who want to sell the small ownership of their house, but keep the usufruct.

In other words, they sell the property, but wish to keep the use, to continue living in their home.

Most of the time, these older people have some loan agreement, which they find it difficult to repay, or they simply wish to live the last years of their life more comfortably, having both the pie whole (the money from the sale) and the dog fed (to live in their home with which there is admittedly an emotional bond).

As … macabre as it sounds, the price of selling a small property depends on the seller’s life expectancy. For a house worth say €300,000, a 60-year-old can secure a price of €120,000 with the buyer knowing that – based on ELSTAT’s expectancy figures – he will not be able to use the house until the seller is 79 on average – if he is male – or 84 if female. However, if the seller was 80 years old, he could sell the freehold for 240,000 euros, very close to the commercial price of the property.

The increased buying interest – even in such circumstances – is fully justified by surveys showing that the market is currently 200,000 homes short of meeting demand.

In fact, according to the current legal framework, the person who buys the freehold also assumes the costs of any renovation that needs to be done. The usufructuary undertakes the obligation to maintain the house in good condition, avoiding damage. The ENFIA is paid together depending on the right. In our example if the beneficiary was 60-70 years old he would pay 30% of the ENFIA.

This new phenomenon is not at all new for Europe. At France it is known as the Viager and has been practiced since 870 AD. Today 1 in 100 house sales in France – around 5,000 each year – are done by this method. And the field of glory is bright, because such sales are growing at a rate of 6-8% per year according to major French brokerages such as Renee Costes Viager.

Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany and Switzerland they are also familiar with viager but 90% of the sales are in France and mainly in Paris, the South of France and the Côte d’Azur and the Bordeaux region.

The big difference compared to the emerging Greek situation is that in France the agreement provides for a lump sum to the beneficiary as well as monthly or quarterly installments.

OR…. thanks to viager it also made it to the cinema. In the movie My Old Lady of Israel Horovitz, o Kevin Kline he inherits a house from his father, where else, in Paris. He arrives in the City of Light, glad to sell the house and fix his life, only to find the most prosperous Maggie Smith to live and to…reign.