She hasn’t been idle. One year after setting up its dedicated platform, Paris City Hall received more than 1,600 reports and sent 490 formal notices, for which an average excess of 159 euros per month was noted. These excesses represent an average overpayment of almost 3,500 euros, indicated Barbara Gomes, delegated advisor in charge of rent control, during a press briefing devoted to the first annual assessment of the transfer of this competence from the State to the city.
“It is a very significant sum, especially when we make the link with the rather precarious, rather young population who live in T1 or T2,” commented the elected communist. According to this municipal report, 82% of reports concern small areas: half of T1 (49%) and a third of T2 (33%).
Real estate agencies singled out
After investigation, an excess is proven in 60% of cases, which shows that the town hall’s control of rent control “works”, estimates housing deputy Jacques Baudrier. “Now the objective is to have tens of thousands” of reports and “hundreds of thousands of tenants who check their rent,” said the elected PCF.
Another lesson: more than half of the reports (55%) concern housing managed by real estate agencies, underlined Barbara Gomes, calling on these professionals to be “vigilant”.
The first city to have applied rent controls in mid-2019, Paris has also been since the beginning of 2023 the first community to be able to directly control this control. The rent cap, which prohibits, with exceptions, renting a property beyond a reference rent, is applied in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Villeurbanne, Montpellier, Bordeaux, and in the intermunicipalities of Seine-Saint-Denis Common Plain and East Together. It will soon be implemented in 24 municipalities in the French Basque Country, including Biarritz and Bayonne.