Airbnb hosts in Paris who fall foul of housing regulations will be sent letters warning them to follow the city’s homesharing rules. The move has been announced in conjunction with Paris City Hall, and follows increasing pressure on Airbnb to manage the growing number of illegal listings on the site.
With listings growing from 40,000 to 60,000 over the last 12 months, Paris is Airbnb’s most popular city. However, the number of long-term rentals and businesses using the site to rent multiple properties – considered by many local residents and officials to be detrimental to the availability of residential housing – has also increased.
From April, Airbnb will send out communications to hosts likely to be renting their primary residence for more than four months or a home that is not their primary residence. In Paris, anyone who wants to rent their house for longer – or rent out a residential property they don’t live in – must apply for a change of use permit and register it as a commercial property. Breaking the rules can result in a fine of up to €25,000.
The new measures from Airbnb will be trialled for four months, after which City Hall will evaluate the impact.
A recent Guardian investigation into Airbnb found that up to 41% of Paris’s entire home listings were either rented out for longer than 120 days a year or rented by a host with more than one listing on the site.
“Homesharing is a great opportunity to showcase the best of Paris and boost economic opportunities for Parisians, but it cannot happen at the expense of affordable housing,” said Jean-François Martins, deputy mayor in charge of tourism and sports. “This represents a step towards more responsible short-term rentals”
However, while the letters mark a positive step from Airbnb – which launched similar measures in San Francisco in January – it is not clear how far the company will go to help officials take action against hosts that ignore the warning and continue to breach rules.
In the last nine months Paris officials have carried out raids on apartments in some of the city’s most popular tourist neighbourhoods – the 1st and 6th arrondissements and the Marais area – in the hope of catching out unregistered commercial landlords.
Last year Airbnb agreed to collect tourist taxes on behalf of Paris, as it has previously in other cities, including Amsterdam, Washington DC and Chicago. But while it has tightened up its operations regarding taxes, it has so far proved reluctant to crack down on illegal rentals on its site.
