TESTIMONY. At the start of the 2024 academic year, a mother tells Capital how she is trying to find student accommodation in Paris for her daughter, in a context of a shortage of rental properties. Visits to unsanitary housing, crazy rents or even unscrupulous landlords: the search turns into a nightmare.
“I’m on the classifieds sites all day, starting at 6am. Before I go to bed, I set alerts around midnight so I’ll be notified if an ad is posted overnight.”. It has now been more than three weeks since Sophie embarked on an almost impossible mission: finding a studio for her daughter in Paris. The latter, originally from the Alpes-Maritimes, needs accommodation to complete her university year in international management. Aware of the difficulty of the task, her mother traveled to Paris for several days in order to visit as many properties as possible and finally find the studio she wanted. But after twenty days of relentless searching, Sophie still has not found any decent accommodation for her daughter.It’s hopeless, I earn a good living but The owners’ demands are crazy and rents keep going up every year. I don’t know what else I can do to find a place to live” she regrets.
Since the beginning of September, Sophie has tried everything. She registered on the main real estate advertising platforms, such as PAP, SeLoger and Leboncoin. Initially, the mother set herself a budget of around 800 euros per month, but she quickly understood that this would not be enough to find a decent studio to rent. By responding to dozens of ads from individuals every day, most of the time within an hour of their publication, Sophie manages to get a few studio visits as best she can. But she quickly becomes disillusioned.
Corridors transformed into apartments
“We visited slums of 11 square meters for more than 900 euros, corridors transformed into apartments because a landlord put in an old mattress, or even a shabby studio on the top floor under the roof.Sophie remembers. You had to go through a passageway along the roofs to get there, after going through a service door that opened onto a garbage room. There were rats walking around” Sophie also says she discovered the concept of souplex during a visit. It is an apartment located under a gutter, where the mother and her daughter were forced to turn on the flash of their smartphone to be able to explore the place. In the middle of a sunny day.
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Sophie tried everything to find the famous studio she was looking for. She even signed up for subscriptions on sites specializing in real estate listings, which offer paid options. In return for a few dozen euros per month, the platforms are supposed to offer her preview listings.This is a scam, I paid the subscription but the famous exclusive ads mysteriously disappeared“, Sophie laments. The mother also knocked on the doors of several real estate agencies, still without success: “I managed to visit a few studios, most of the time they were group visits, there were about ten of us in 9 square meters, it was crazy”. Sophie quickly understands that the agencies have very few properties to offer and that they receive hundreds of calls from candidates within an hour of the ad being posted online. The mother does not blame the real estate agencies, who do not have the human resources to handle all these requests.
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However, she deplores the behavior of certain Parisian landlords, who ask for several months’ rent as a deposit, do not respect rent controls and demand guarantors with astronomical salaries.Even if you earn a good living, it becomes impossible to pay several months of deposit for a rent of 1,000 euros and ever-increasing agency fees. But it is so difficult to find a property that we are ready to accept almost anything“, admits Sophie. While waiting to find the famous studio so sought after, her daughter is temporarily staying with a friend while continuing her studies. A far from ideal situation, experienced by tens of thousands of students each year.
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