If you are going to Paris for a travel abroad college program, vacation or work trip, and plan to find an accent-rich Parisian home on AirBnb (ABNB), you may have a hard time finding hosts, because Airbnb just announced a new rule limiting rentals to 120 days a year in certain areas in Paris, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Airbnb will enforce the rule in the first four arrondissements, or boroughs, in Paris. Paris has 20 arrondissements named and ordered numerically, spiraling from the city center to the outskirts. The first four arrondissements are the most tourist-centric, due to their proximity to attractions like Le Marais and the Louvre Museum.
While some city officials celebrated Airbnb’s new self-regulation (British news site The Independent reported a city official praised the decision on Twitter), others were totally unimpressed.
The Journal reported that Paris’ housing policy officials dismissed the decision as insufficient, because France already has a housing law that limits leisure rental to 120 days, which applies countrywide.
Maxime Cochard, Paris’s deputy mayor, posted on Twitter yesterday, “Law provides that these illegal ads should be removed in all boroughs.”
Airbnb told the Journal that they picked these four districts after seeing large number of violations in the area, and the decision was not to replace law enforcement.
Regulations for short-term renting in France are strict, lengthy and sometimes baffle local residents.
Similar to rules in New York, only owners are allowed to list their homes on Airbnb. Renters, unless they have special agreements with their landlords, are prohibited from subleasing—including via Airbnb. In Paris, even with landlord permission, renters are not allowed to make more money than what they pay in rent on a yearly basis. Rules also differ for first-home owners and second-owners.
“Even for French people, it’s difficult to understand everything,” Olivier François, an Airbnb host in Quimper, France, wrote on Airbnb community forum.
Paris is Airbnb’s largest market by the number of listings. A 2016 study by Toulouse School of Economics shows that, between 2010 and 2016, Paris listings on Airbnb increased exponentially from virtually none to 65,217. London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin and New York City are also Airbnb’s major markets.
