The Olympics (July 26 – August 11, Editor’s note) add fuel to the fire and make the social bomb that is student housing more explosive,” warns Eléonore Schmitt, spokesperson for the Student Union, the one of the main student unions.
According to her, some students even had to “leave Paris” to find a first job due to the rise in accommodation prices or an end of lease that they had not anticipated, rather than accepting “ unsanitary housing at too high prices.
Questioned, the National Real Estate Federation (Fnaim) believes that the Olympic Games, an “event of international reputation”, are indeed “likely to disrupt the market”. “Some owners rent year-round but have turned to rental platforms to rent by the night during this period,” observes Loïc Cantin, its president.
Freshly graduated from a master’s degree in sports management, Claire, originally from Bayonne, was looking for a job in the capital linked to the Games. Like many other students, she said goodbye to this ambition. “Because of the rental prices, I was unable to find accommodation in Paris,” explains the young woman, for whom housing was the first blocking factor, before the question of business. In the meantime, she opted for a summer job in catering in Anglet (Pyrénées-Atlantiques).
According to Fnaim, the average price of Parisian rents per square meter increased by 3.5% between 2022 and 2023, despite the rent controls in force since 2019. Among the prices deemed “excessive”, the Orpi group cites the advertisement of a “three-bedroom house with garden to rent in Champigny-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne) for 500 euros per night”. But it is above all the shortage of advertisements which is embolizing the market, underlines Jacques Baudrier (PCF), deputy mayor in charge of housing.
” Impossible mission “
“For more than ten years, 8,000 private rental homes have disappeared from the market each year in Paris due to the increase, in the same proportion, in the number of vacant homes and second homes,” underlines the elected official, who predicts “ that the number of vacant homes will exceed that of rented homes in a few years if the State does not regulate the market.”
“Bien Ici”, a platform specializing in online real estate advertisements, notes a “fourfold increase, in five years, in rental tension in Paris”.
Since the summer of 2022, the company has recorded on average “more than 100,000 rental requests in Paris each month, compared to 68,000 a year previously”. And according to a SeLoger survey published in February, the stock of advertisements for apartments for rent “has fallen by 74% in three years in Paris”.
Hugo, a communications student in Bordeaux, had to give up an end-of-studies internship from June. “I inquired with agencies. They clearly explained to me that from July to August, they would have no accommodation and that if they did, places would be expensive,” he says, bitterly.
This difficulty in finding accommodation in the run-up to the Olympics was already palpable before the summer, according to Yvenn le Coz, national delegate of the National Inter-University Union (Uni), according to whom “many students arriving during school year complained about housing problems. “The second semester was horrible for the students. It was mission impossible to find accommodation,” he regrets.
According to Lodgis, a network of agencies specializing in furnished rentals, the Games are even transforming “usual professional mobility”, to the extent that companies are also “limiting the travel of their employees to Paris for fear of soaring prices and push them back to September. »