Paris to Introduce Short Term Rental Registration

Paris City Council are set to introduce a new law to force people renting property on short term rental websites such as Airbnb to register the property at City Hall first.

The law is expected to be voted through unanimously by the Paris City Council this week, and will be targeting landlords who break the 120 day legal limit in France for renting out primary residences.

It is also expected to stop tenants advertising their apartments on short term rental websites without permission from the landlord.

A recent update in France’s internet laws now allows cities with over 200,000 residents to monitor the short term rental market with registration.

The short term rental market has been seen as a major threat to the hotel sector in Paris, with around 44 per cent of properties advertised on Airbnb being permanently available for rental as long ago as 2015.

If the new law goes through as expected landlords will be able to register from October 1st, and from December 1st, registration will be obligatory.

Paris has one of the largest short term rental markets with over 65,000 properties available on Airbnb alone, and in October the lawmakers in France decided that anyone using economy websites such as Airbnb to make money should be treated as professionals and taxed accordingly.

The new rules should help to level the playing field between professional buy to let landlords and those renting out properties, possibly illegally, through short term rental websites.

Each property will only be allowed to be registered once on the new system, and it is planned that Parisians simply wanting to ‘boost their finances at the end of the month’ or during their holidays will be unaffected by the new law. However, it is felt that the law is needed to help monitoring in case of ‘abuse’.

Deputy Mayor of Paris, Bruno Julliard, commented: ‘At the moment, it’s very difficult to monitor if the law is being respected.’

The authorities believe that the new law will make it impossible to cheat the system, and online rental platforms will be expected to delete landlord profiles if they are found to be exceeding the legal limit.