Bastille Day Balls and Blues

Bastille Day comes but once a year. The last few years I’ve celebrated it in New Orleans coinciding with my mother’s birthday — July 13th. Yesterday would have been her 99th if she had not passed away last year and so my sisters in New Orleans celebrated it with her in spirit.

Here we celebrated Bastille Day with last night’s festivities of the Bals des Pompiers, today with the Military Parade along the Champs Elysées in the morning and the fireworks at the Eiffel Tower later tonight. I try to miss nothing — all that Pomp and Circumstance is so much a part of the French culture and it’s absolute fun.

Next week in the “Parler Paris Nouvellettre®” I’ll report on the full scope, leaving today’s French Property Insider for discussion on a topic affecting our property investments.

Recently the French Parliament agreed on the contents of a digital bill that makes home sharing and short-term rentals even more complex for the owners. The official vote will take place in the Fall to introduce a “license to rent.” Many thousands have signed petitions and shared their stories with the Prime Minister and the Parliament to consider the ‘regular people’ who can continue to share or rent their homes without such burdensome procedures.

We wholeheartedly agree with the others in our short-term rental domain that the provisions of the bill are designed to protect industry in lieu of the individual — the hotel industry and the corporations that can afford to develop apartment-type hotels, leaving the individual home-owner without revenue from their property investments. The very Socialist government which professes protection of the working class are restricting their own constituents from earning necessary revenues while transferring it to the hands of the wealthy in the interest of taxation and control. They think nothing of the rental customers either — those who need the accommodations at an affordable rate. In all honesty, it’s shockingly misguided.

Platforms like Airbnb have been influential in limiting the scope of the bill. It applies only to big cities and only activated if the city authorities choose to do so. This means that even if passed, cities such as Paris, Nice and the others of 200,000 + population will have the right to enforce them or not. To date, Paris is the only city making this choice. Cities such as Nice would be devastated by such an initiative with such a large population of non-resident holiday home owners who are financially dependent on their vacation rentals and the visitors who also depend on them for accommodations. The same is true for Paris, but the authorities fail to realize that Paris is an international city with a very heterogenous population with a multitude of needs.
    
Don’t worry unnecessarily. We are following the progress and working to find solutions as are many others in our field. How the authorities will begin to successfully enforce the restrictions is unclear. We believe it will be near to impossible as the needs of both the owner and the guest will not go away. And neither will we.

Happy Bastille Day!

A bientôt,

Adrian Leeds
The Adrian Leeds Group

Respond to Adrian: [email protected]

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