'Report: Small-town real estate crisis - it's getting harder to find a place to live.'

In France, the crisis in the real estate market is not only affecting big cities. In rural areas, mayors also face many challenges. The "TF1" team traveled to two towns in the Ardennes affected by the phenomenon.

"The more housing, the more population, the greater the risk of increasing the customer base," exclaims François Potdeven, a butcher from the village of Auvil-le-Forge, in the Ardennes.

In this small community of 900 inhabitants, a dynamic life is attracting more and more people, but many are having trouble finding a place to live. Inheritance problems, overly expensive work to bring up to code... a lot of empty and uninhabitable houses'. 'construction. "I always have a waiting list of ten to fifteen people for new housing," he says.

Fifty kilometers away is the town of Retel (Ardennes), which has found itself in a complete lack of residential real estate.

This agency has virtually no offers for either rental or sale.

Remodeling instead of building. In one of the houses in Retel where our film crew visited, the new owners have insulated and''heating system, to the tune of 50,000 euros, 20% of which was covered by a subsidy from the city. "We need to preserve our natural and agricultural land. Therefore, it is important to restore everything we can. Over the last five or six years, we have spent more than 400,000 euros on repairs, which has led to two million euros worth of work," explains Renaud Averley, head of the community of the Retel district.