More than 90% of French people would like to own a property. This is an irrepressible desire
based primarily on rational factors: first of all owning your own property guarantees social
status, a comfortable "home of your own" is also felt to be somewhere you can shelter the
outside world, which can sometimes be rather a stressful place, parents want to hand an
inheritance built upon a sound investment down to their children, and finally "why pay rent
when you could be paying a mortgage?"
But there is also something irrational behind the desire to own your own property because,
in a world in which fewer and fewer couples are getting married and are increasingly splitting
up, and in which life expectancy is constantly on the increase, property is seen as the
last tangible thing people can hang onto. At least, this is the theory developed by the psychiatrist
Doctor Jacques-Antoine Malarewicz, in a study called "the irrational factors involved in
the purchasing of property".