Photo: Bloomberg News
By Joshua Mitnick - February 3, 2015
Originally appeared here on The Wall Street Journal
TEL AVIV—Residential real-estate prices in Israel have been on a tear for the past seven years. An expected wave of French Jews fleeing an increasingly tense environment in France could push prices even higher.
Advertisements written in French fill the display windows of a strip of real-estate brokerages in this city just steps from the Mediterranean Sea. The influx of the Jewish diaspora from France, the U.S. and other places across the globe helped contribute to a near-doubling of Israel’s home prices since the end of 2007.
According to The Jewish Agency for Israel, an organization that works on immigration issues, 10,000 French Jews will move to Israel this year compared with 7,000 last year.
“January and February are not usually very busy periods because of the winter,” said Eric Toubiana, a co-owner of the Comacom Group brokerage on the city’s busy Ben Yehuda Street. “But ever since the period of Charlie, we’ve had a huge amount of work,” he said, referring to the attack in Paris on the staffers of the French satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo that left 12 dead. Mr. Toubiana said his business partner has flown to France to deal with all the extra business. Read More