Student accommodation: “We visited slums costing more than 900 euros per month”

TESTIMONY. A mother told Capital how she tried to find student accommodation in Paris for her daughter, during the 2024 academic year, in a context of a great shortage of rental properties. Visits to unsanitary housing, crazy rents, unscrupulous landlords: their search turned into a nightmare.

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“I’m on the ad sites all day. I start at 6 a.m. and, before going to bed, I program alerts around midnight to receive a notification in case an announcement is posted overnight.. When the 2024 academic year began, Sophie embarked on an almost impossible mission, namely to find a studio for her daughter in Paris. The latter, originally from the Alpes-Maritimes, needed 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 be able to visit as many properties as possible and finally find the studio she so desired. But after twenty days of relentless searching, Sophie still has not found any decent accommodation for her daughter. “It’s desperate, I earn a good living but the demands of the owners are crazy and rents continue to rise every year. I don’t know what more I can do to find accommodation», she regrets.

Since the beginning of September, Sophie has tried everything. She has registered on the main real estate advertising platforms, such as PAP, SeLoger and Leboncoin. Initially, the mother set 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 advertisements from individuals every day, most of the time within an hour of their publication, Sophie manages as best she can to secure a few studio visits. But she becomes disillusioned very quickly.

Corridors transformed into apartments

“We visited slums of 11 square meters for more than 900 euros, corridors transformed into apartments because an owner put an old mattress, or even a dingy studio on the top floor under the roofremembers Sophie. You had to go through a passageway all along the roofs to access it, after taking a service door which opened onto a garbage room. There were rats wandering around“. Sophie also says she discovered the concept of flexiblex during a visit. It is an apartment located below 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, coveted studio. She even took out subscriptions on sites specializing in real estate ads, which offer paid options. In return for a few dozen euros per month, the platforms are supposed to offer preview announcements. “It’s a scam, I paid for the subscription but the famous exclusive announcements have mysteriously disappeared», laments Sophie. The mother also knocked on the doors of several real estate agencies, always without success: “I managed to visit a few studios, most of the time, they were group visits, there were around ten of us in 9 square meters, it was crazy”. Sophie quickly understands that agencies have very few properties to offer and that they receive hundreds of calls from candidates within an hour of the ad being put online. The mother does not blame the real estate agencies, who do not have the human resources to process all these requests.

On the other hand, 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’ deposit for a rent of 1,000 euros and ever-increasing agency fees. But it’s so difficult to find a property that we are ready to accept almost anything», recognizes Sophie. While waiting to find the famous studio she is looking for, 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.