Geoxia built France's prefab homes — and was liquidated with 1,800 unfinished

Maisons Phénix was founded in July 1945 by André Pux and Roger Boutteville, after Charles de Gaulle sent engineers to Britain to study the industrialised home-building methods used for post-war reconstruction. The company pioneered prefabricated housing in France, offering a complete finished house at a fixed price using a steel-frame construction system. By 1979 it was building 20,000 houses a year — 10% of all individual home construction in France — and had sold 240,000 houses across 4,000 different models.

The decline began in the 1980s as competitors (Maisons Bouygues, the architect-builder groups) offered masonry houses that aged better and attracted younger, more mobile buyers. Phénix had difficulty moving upmarket from its low-cost prefab model. In the 1990s, its parent company Immobilière Phénix diversified into hotels and real estate, acquiring Cidotel and Libertel, and accumulated 6 billion francs in debt by 1993, with a 2.3 billion franc deficit in 1994. The company was restructured, and in 1999 Maisons Phénix was spun off into a new holding company, Geoxia, through a management buyout.

In 2009, private equity fund LBO France acquired Geoxia in a leveraged buyout. The company, now carrying debt from the LBO, struggled as the French housing market tightened. By the late 2000s it was building only 2,000 houses a year. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and soaring energy and raw material prices hit the fixed-price, low-margin model hard. In 2022, Geoxia's bank refused a state-guaranteed loan (PGE), and the company could not meet its obligations.

The Nanterre commercial court placed Geoxia in judicial reorganization (redressement judiciaire) on 24 May 2022, and converted it to judicial liquidation on 28 June 2022. Fourteen of seventeen Geoxia companies were liquidated. The collapse left 1,140 employees without jobs and 1,800 construction sites unfinished. Because Geoxia was the only builder using the Phénix steel-frame method, no other contractor could take over the sites, leaving thousands of buyers in legal limbo.