Yesterday, Georges and I headed over to a real estate agent's (un immobilier) office just steps from the Parc Monceau, to meet the proprietaire of the apartment we will be renting so we could sign the lease and write a few checks to kick things off.
Just outside the metro, we ran into Monsieur A (the very nice agent who showed us the apartment) on the corner. I had thought that he would be the one doing the paperwork with us, but instead he greeted us and directed us two doors further down the street to their offices and said the proprietaire was already there (even though we were 10 minutes early ourselves) so they were ready to get started. The woman at the desk got up, called down some stairs to someone there, and then we were invited to go very carefully ("Attention vos têtes!" -- "Watch your heads!") down the narrow staircase with the low ceiling into a small office where two older gentlemen were awaiting us. The one NOT wearing the suit had to be the proprietaire; the other was the boss and the one who does all the legal paperwork for rentals.
Introductions all around. The owner, Monsieur S, who appears to be in his mid-to-late 60s, co-owns the entire 7-story building along with his sister; when the agent first told us this, Georges assumed (rightly) that they probably had inherited it from their parents. And I thought what an incredible investment THAT must have been, the parents might even have bought it pre-war. The building has a ground-floor commercial space that houses a scuplture studio (moment of panic when Georges and I realized that "sculpture" sometimes involves VERY LOUD HAMMERING on granite and this studio gives classes all day until around 10 or 11pm, and our apartment is immediately above the studio; but turns out they do clay/ceramic sculpture only. Whew!) Then, there are 6 floors above, the first 5 have one apartment each and the top floor has two small studios. So these owners (who live over in the very snooty chic 16th) have a very good retirement income for themselves, one day to be left to their own children.
The only times I have rented apartments in Paris, there was no big official "ceremony". In both cases, the people I was renting from were Americans, and therefore uncomplicated. I had no lease for the first one, which ended up being a temporary sublet, and although I did have a lease on the second one, that was more for my need to have something official with my name and address on it so I could open a bank account. Otherwise, it was all very casual and laid back; basically I just showed up and was handed the keys, having already wired the funds to the owners beforehand.
Not so this time. I swear, we initialled and signed almost as many papers to rent this apartment as we did in December when we bought our little investment on rue Durantin. Then, Georges wrote three checks: the first to cover the one-month security deposit, which the owner is entitled to cash immediately. The second is for the rent for the 2nd half of March, which the owner will hold until March 15th when our lease takes effect. And the third was for "honoraires" or the agency's fee, which was approximately a month and a half rent or perhaps a bit less (I suck at math so don't ask me to calculate a percentage). There will also be a 4th special sum to arrange as well, called the garantie locative; in France, many landlords require a tenant to put on hold, in the tenant's bank, a sum of money equivalent to anywhere from a couple of month's rent to a full year's rent. Neither the owner nor the tenant can touch that money, unless (a) the tenant moves out on good terms (in which case the owner will notify the bank that everything is OK and they can release the funds back to the tenant), or (b) if the tenant skips out without paying the rent, the owners can go after that money. In our current apartment, we had to put up a full year's worth of rent, and in the new place it's "only" 6-month's-worth. The law does not require this and not all property owners do this (case in point: with the investment apartment we own, the previous owner took a 2-month security deposit from the tenant, which we now have custody of, but NO garantie locative), but it seems to be a fairly common practice and if you want rent an apartment where the owner requires it, you have no choice.
Here's what I don't entirely understand about these garanties. Even though we also put up a month's rent as a security deposit (which I'm assuming could be used either to cover repairs for any damages after we move out or if we don't pay our last month's rent -- they don't seem to ask for first AND last month's rent here), we also have to freeze 6 month's worth of rent in the bank for the entire term of our lease or until we move out, whichever comes first (in the event we stay longer than 3 years and renew the lease, I'm not sure if the garantie must also be continued or if that's negotiable). The bail (pronounced like "by-yeh", not "bale"), or lease, covers a standard 3-year period (owners are entitled to a modest annual rent increase but how much they can raise the rent is regulated by law). But UNLIKE an American lease, we can move out any time within that 3 years without financial penalty as long as we give the owners 3 month's notice (we have the same set-up now, and by the time we move out we will have stayed only 2 of the 3 years of our lease, but since we are giving 3 month's notice we do not have to pay for that remaining 12 months). So... if we have to give 3 month's notice anyway, why is the garantie not the equivalent of THREE month's of rent instead of SIX or TWELVE? How would the owners ever be entitled to take MORE than 3 month's rent if we left without 3 month's notice? Georges would probably say it's more for the owner's peace of mind than anything else; they want to know they are renting to people who are financially viable and who can afford to let that kind of money sit around for up to 3 years doing absolutely NOTHING, not even earning any interest. Pfft.
This most likely, at least in part, explains why Paris has such a huge homeless population. Rents here are the highest in France, even in the less attractive and cheapest parts of town or in the 'burbs, and if you need to have thousands or even tens of thousands of euros available for a guarantee before you can rent an apartment, but you are barely scraping by month-to-month as it is... what are your options?
We will still need to arrange to do the état des lieux (the "state of things", the official pre-move walk-through where all parties looks at every wall, ceiling, floor, closet, nook, cranny, plumbing fixture and appliance to note any existing damages, problems or even the tiniest scratch on an official carbon-copy form, so when you move out and do the same process again, everyone involved can prove if that hole in the wall was already there to begin with -- or not). But we can't do that until after the current tenants move out, around March 4th or so. We'll probably get the keys after we do the walk-through, and then it's officially ours. We're still in this apartment for a month after that, so we'll be able to plan our move without feeling too rushed before Easter holidays, which run from April 14th to April 29th.
So after we got done signing and paraph-ing (initialling) about 8 different stacks of documents in the agent's office, I looked at Georges and said:
"The last time I rented an apartment in the U.S., I went for the first and only visit to see the place. Afterward, the owner and I sat in her car and discussed terms. I took the place on the spot; she pulled a standard 1-year lease out of her bag. I signed it (ONE signature and NO initials) and wrote her ONE check to cover the total for the first and last month's rent plus 1 1/2 month's security (the usual standard in the U.S.). No need for the bank to hold 6 month's rent! Plus, the law required her to put my security deposit in an interest-bearing savings account! The day before move-in day I went back to pick up the keys, and that was that. Everything was cleaned and freshly painted; here, the owners won't repaint or even clean, so if the previous tenants leave a mess, we have to live with it, clean it or paint it ourselves. In the States, kitchens come fully equipped; here, we need to supply our own fridge and oven and we're just LUCKY they're not taking the kitchen cabinets with them. And we just signed almost as many papers as we did when we bought the other apartment. Why do you people over-complicate everything?!"
He had no real answer, but he had to agree because this is so often what life is like in France. The French don't like it either, but things like this never, ever change.
So he just gave me a French shrug. And a kiss. And then we left.
