It is Bordeaux’s turn to regulate rents for new leases, lease renewals and mobility leases. The rent control system will apply in Bordeaux for bare and furnished rental leases signed from this Friday, July 15. As elsewhere, current leases and tacit renewals are not affected.
Paris and Lille were the first two cities to control their rents, then joined by the Plaine-Commune agglomeration community (9 cities north of Paris) then more recently by Lyon, Villeurbanne, the Est-Ensemble agglomeration community ( 9 communes of Seine-Saint-Denis) and Montpellier. This experimental system is regularly challenged by real estate professionals or by associations for the defense of owners such as the UNPI, which even takes legal action against the decrees fixing the perimeters for setting up rent controls.
4 geographical areas in Bordeaux
In all these cities, rents excluding charges cannot exceed a reference rent level expressed by a price per square meter of living space (set by the prefect according to the district and the type of housing) increased by 20%, to which add a “rental supplement” freely defined by the owner if the accommodation justifies certain characteristics of rental or comfort. This additional price must then be mentioned in the lease contract.
Reference rents are classified according to the category of housing: house or apartment, number of rooms, furnished or unfurnished and period of construction. In Bordeaux, they have also been delimited into 4 geographical zones to better reflect the price differences between districts. The most expensive area thus includes the city center as far as Chartrons or Caudéran.
Landlords will have to adjust their prices
According to a study by the real estate platform Meilleurs Agents, 62% of ads posted in Bordeaux before the application of the law are currently above the new reference thresholds and the amount of the monthly overrun would amount to €200. .
” In Bordeaux, the framework comes into effect in a context of very marked rent increases. We will have to follow this dynamic in the months to come before we can see a real and lasting effect on rents. It should also be remembered that an advertisement exceeding the authorized ceilings is not necessarily illegal: the law authorizes landlords to request additional rent if the accommodation has special qualities not taken into account by the management. recalls Barbara Castillo Rico, Head of economic studies at Meilleurs Agents.
An experiment regularly contested by donors
To date, rent control remains a possible experiment when 4 conditions are met: a significant difference between the average level of rent observed in the private rental stock and the average rent in the social rental stock, a high median rent level , a low rate of housing starts in relation to existing housing over the past five years and limited prospects for multi-year housing production included in the local housing program, with weak prospects for its development. Elements that are not always easy to measure and therefore leave room for different interpretations.
In large cities, rent control is superimposed on the limitation of the increase in rents for housing in tight areas, according to which rents cannot be increased more than the rent reference index (IRL), calculated each quarter by INSEE on the basis of inflation excluding tobacco, but whose increase should be capped at +3.5% between the third quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2023.