Europe1 .fr with AFP 17:01 p.m., May 04, 2023

To protect the permanent residents of the capital against the explosion of rentals, the City of Paris will ban new furnished tourist rentals from professional rental companies in certain neighborhoods. It is the areas of tourist hyperconcentration that are most concerned by this measure, such as the Grands Boulevards or the Champs-Elysées.

The City of Paris will ban new furnished tourist rentals from professional renters in areas of tourist hyperconcentration that suffer from a housing deficit, to protect permanent residents from the explosion of Airbnb-type rentals, it was learned Thursday.

"Entire sectors of Paris will be prohibited to the creation of new furnished tourist accommodation because we consider that the offer is already very abundant and we aim for a sprawl and a balance of implantation in Paris intramural," explained to the press Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy mayor PS of Paris during a stroll in the district of Sentier (second arrondissement), Very affected by the transformation of shops into furnished tourist accommodation.

The professional rental companies concerned

Among these districts are Paris Centre, the Canal Saint-Martin, the Grands Boulevards, the Champs-Elysées and Montmartre.

This measure, which does not provide for quantified objectives in the form of quotas, will not apply to owners who occasionally rent their main residence within the limit of 120 days per year but only to professional renters.

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The city, which had 43,000 furnished tourist accommodation in autumn 2022, also hopes to take advantage of a bill that will be discussed in June at the National Assembly to regulate the transformation of offices into furnished tourist accommodation.

Elected officials fear that investors' appetite will now turn to offices, for which there is still no regulatory tool, after having set their sights on small businesses, whose transformation is now regulated. According to Dorine Bregman, assistant in charge of shops at Paris Centre, one in eight businesses has been transformed into furnished tourist accommodation in the heart of the capital between 2020 and 2022.

Tougher regulations

Long helpless in the face of the uncontrolled explosion of furnished tourist accommodation, the City of Paris has greatly strengthened its legal arsenal in recent years. Since 2014, Paris has set up a system of authorization of change of use with compensation in case of transformation of a dwelling into furnished tourist accommodation. Since 2022, Parisian regulations even require that the surface area be compensated up to triple in some neighborhoods.

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The regulations have also been tightened for businesses whose change of use to furnished tourist accommodation has been subject to authorization from the town hall since January 2022. In 2021, the Airbnb platform, attacked by the City, was also fined 8 million euros for publishing a thousand ads without a registration number.

"Today, the regulatory tools are showing their first positive effects and we are witnessing a decline in the number of furnished tourist accommodation declared," said Emmanuel Grégoire.