Finding an apartment in Paris is notoriously difficult.
The first two apartments I lived in I found through my university, who helped me a great deal. I did not need a guarantor for these places because they knew I was an American student with student loans to help me pay the rent.
Much like how the USA charges foreign students three times the tuition they charge citizens. If you have enough to go abroad for your education, you’re probably good for it.
My third apartment, the one where I currently live, I found on my own. When I was looking for a new place to live in the summer of 2020, the only help I had was from a friend who spoke better French than me, who helped me with phone calls and visits.
But she was not French, she was Moroccan, and while she actually helped me get an offer on one apartment, I ended up turning that apartment down because I felt like there was something better out there for me.
A few weeks later I found the apartment I am about to leave.
Why is it so difficult to find an apartment in Paris? Well, I can only guess that it’s because living in Paris is in high demand. There’s also the process of putting together a file, or dossier, that the landlord will accept. That usually requires one to have a permanent work contract (CDI) making more than 3x the rent which is actually damn near impossible for most people with average jobs.
There’s also the matter of having a guarantor. If you’re a foreigner with no friends or family in France making three times your rent, you need to pay out of pocket to some shady third party, or have a years worth of rent blocked up in your bank account (and if you’re new here you may not even be able to open a bank account without a place to live…catch 22).
The difficulty of proving you make enough to rent even if you do leads many people to fake their documents. It’s almost standard.
Once you have a nice dossier ready to go there’s the matter of sorting through the endless scams cluttering the apartment postings that can fool even the most savvy of searchers, although most people aren’t really that savvy.
There’s a particularly nasty scam that uses Air b&b to show the apartment to prospective renters, sign a fake contract and take their deposit and first month rent only to have the real owners come back just before or after moving day.
The real best way to find a new apartment is just…to know someone who’s moving out and can put in a good word for you with the landlord.
And this is how I found my new apartment.
At the end of March I’ll be moving into a new apartment in the same building where I currently live. I realized a while ago that my current landlord has been wildly overcharging me for the place where I live, while also maintaining that she was following the Paris rent law.
In the fall, she attempted to raise my rent even further, while pretending like she had been doing me a favor by not raising it until now. She met with me in person, and showed me – on her phone – some random numbers PROVING how much she had “saved” me, like some kind of used car salesman.
I was offended that she thought I was so dumb.
You see, in Paris there is a strict law about how much one can charge for an apartment and also how much one can raise the rent in any given year. If you don’t raise it for one year, you forfeit that raise. It’s not automatic, as she was trying to convince me it was.
Thankfully, I felt this coming, and I had thought to ask someone in my building if he knew of anyone moving out.
Unfortunately, I still had to go through a bit of a battle with my landlord over the rent increase that I eventually lost, because when I moved into this apartment I had to shell out for the shady third party guarantor service that eventually strong armed me into paying the full rent increase in total disregard of the law.
But that’s okay. In January I heard back from the man who told me that someone was indeed moving out in mid-february. What a stroke of luck! An apartment that is almost the same price of what my rent has been raised to, but bigger and actually respecting the rent control laws of Paris.
First, I went to go see the apartment and discovered I actually hated the layout.
Right now my apartment is a studio, and everything is close together and easily accessible. In this new, bigger apartment, Everything is in a separate room, including the toilet being separate from the bathroom, and far away from the bedroom.
This is standard for a Parisian apartment, but is devastating for someone like me, who pees about 50 bajillion times a night.
It’s also, according to my friends, not a good enough reason to turn down an apartment that’s in the same building for a decent price in a neighborhood that I love where I know everyone.
I knew I did NOT want this apartment, but I also knew that an opportunity like this does not come every day. If I didn’t even try, who knows when another apartment in the building might become available? (Also, I had missed an opportunity the year before when I neglected to ask in advance, and I’ve been kicking myself for that ever since.)
The whole process began with finding out the apartment was available in the second week of January. I was not expecting this to happen at all, I was still recovering from the holidays and trying to motivate myself to look for new clients. I was caught totally off guard.
Thus began the nerve wracking process of collecting all of the documents needed to apply for this apartment. In addition, asking someone I know to be my guarantor which is no small thing. I wasn’t sure if I even had any friends willing to take on that kind of responsibility for me.
I almost didn’t even bother to apply for it honestly. It was only thanks to the encouragement of my extremely reasonable friends that I made the effort at all. I knew that if I applied I would get it.
And of course I did. After speaking on the phone a couple weeks later, the landlord was happy to give me the apartment. Turns out I DO have a friend good enough to offer to be my guarantor. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the current resident to move out.
She ended up extending her stay from the end of February until the end of March which was just fine for me. I wasn’t really ready to move and ended up spending the last two and a half months agonizing over leaving a place that I’ve called home for almost five years.
This is the longest time I’ve stayed in one place since I left my parents’ home in 2008. I’m really very sad about it. It might be the only time I wasn’t truly ready to move.
Which is so ironic because I’ve actually been wanting to move out of this place since maybe the first year. It’s only NOW that I finally feel comfortable there and I don’t want to move.
But it is happening. And fast now. I have the contract, I’ve updated my housing insurance, I’ve made plans with friends to come and help me move.
And for my birthday this year I will be moving into my first “big girl” apartment since I moved to Paris. It only took nine years hahaha.
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Bisous 😘
Honey
Doux Comme Miel 