Terraced house, garden and 223 square meters at a price of 160,000 euros, you can look for that in Paris for a long time.

In Chartres, on the other hand, offers like these adorn the windows of real estate agencies.

Their employees are busy and have little time for a chat.

It is no coincidence that many of the offers are advertised with slogans such as “five minutes on foot to the main train station”.

Because capital city residents have long been drawn to Chartres in the Beauce, France's granary, not just to stroll between the cathedral and half-timbered houses.

Niklas Záboji

Business correspondent in Paris

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With the regional express connection, the 40,000-inhabitant community, one hour southwest of Paris, is enjoying growing popularity - even among those who have had enough of the densely populated metropolitan region of Île-de-France with its more than twelve million people Want to relocate in whole or at least in part.

The emigration from the country, which has been observed for a long time in France as well as in Germany, seems to be slowed down a bit in Chartres.

The purchase price for apartments has increased by around 4 percent within twelve months.

If you want to buy a house, you have to pay almost 7 percent more per square meter than a year ago.

Why sit in a confined space in a crowded, noisy and expensive metropolis?

The province is also flourishing in other regions of the country. French magazines have been rife with stories of people turning their backs on Paris for months. Sometimes it is the therapist who bought a house in a small community and now only goes to the capital from Wednesday to Saturday. Sometimes it is the couple who doubled their living space by moving and have since commuted and rented a shared office on site. Employees, artists, freelancers, young families with or without children - there are examples for all population groups.

What most Paris refugees have in common is that they have been able to work from home since the outbreak of the pandemic. Until recently, this was even more unusual in the traditionally more hierarchical French economy than in Germany: Before Corona, only one in four employees occasionally went to the “télétravail”, as the French say about their home office. It is currently almost one in three. And why sit in a confined space in a crowded, noisy and expensive metropolis when, thanks to the internet, work can now be done between orchards and grain fields?

A survey by the opinion research institute Ifop in July this year suggests that it is no longer just retirees who are longing for more peace and quiet. According to this, 44 percent of young workers under the age of 35 who live in major French cities say that they are planning to move to the countryside. That is 8 percentage points more than a year earlier. Across all age groups, around a third of the big cities are planning to move away. The pollsters sum up: The high number of people who want to go out into the country could lead to "considerable population movements" in the coming years.

Recent real estate market figures suggest the exodus has already begun. The prices for new apartments have recently risen as sharply as in Rennes. In the north-west French city with around 220,000 inhabitants, the square meter now costs more than 5,000 euros, calculates the Laboratoire de L'Immobilier - 10 percent more than in November 2020. Rennes has become the sixth most expensive French city. One possible explanation: With its medieval center, where you can quickly get from A to B on foot, it is not only worth living in, but is also just an hour's drive from the Breton coast. At the same time, anyone who has to go to Paris for business or pleasure canwho cover around 350 kilometers in the morning in an hour and a half in the TGV - and in the evening sit back in the bistro in Rennes.