An American in Paris, no matter how besotted with the food, the wine, and the breathtaking beauty of the place, will invariably, after several weeks of apartment hunting, be tempted to turn right around and head back to America.
There, or at least in New York, where I'm from, rentals operate according to the Golden Rule of Real Estate: He with the most gold rules. Whoever gets there first with a check gets the apartment. If you lose out on one, there's another available just up the block. The turnaround is quick and painless, and real estate agents work on the customer's behalf, hoping to rack up as many commissions as possible.
Would that it were so simple in Paris.
Back in 2004, I had just arrived in Paris, intending to stay for good. I had finally found an apartment after three weeks of hunting, and when I told my friend Thomas, he congratulated me on my speed. My speed? I repeated, in a bit of a stupor after three weeks of rejections. Sure, he said, nodding vigorously. Three weeks is nothing. Sometimes it takes months. "I knew a guy," he confided, "who took five months to find a place!"
The guy must look like a serial killer, I thought.
Not so. This time around, it took me six weeks to find a place -- and my dossier has only gotten stronger since 2004.
What's a dossier? A very good question. Your dossier is the bureaucratic equivalent of your worth as a human being. Finding a nice apartment within your budget in Paris is not actually all that difficult. Getting the owner to rent it to you is the hard part, and your success or failure depends on the quality of your dossier, along with a host of other less quantifiable variables. To apply for an apartment, you have to put together a bundle of photocopies that includes your last three paychecks, your previous two tax declarations, your work contract attesting that you are hired for an indefinite period (called a CDI), and a photocopy of your ID. Your guarantor must submit the same documents. The nicer the apartment and the neighborhood, the more complex the list of documents required to apply for it.
The basic idea, one would think, is to confirm that you and your guarantor make enough money to pay the rent. But very often, all the applicants for a given apartment will meet the financial requirements, and after that, the choice of tenant is at the owner's discretion. It's meant to be more egalitarian than awarding the prize to the one with the most cash. That would be too American. So instead, everyone is put through this rigmarole under the pretense that it's fairer to people with a lower income. And as you might have inferred, it's also used as a means of discriminating against certain unwanted tenants.
A French comedy show called "Groland" featured a sketch a few months ago in which a young French couple go to visit an apartment. They pass a long line of other couples waiting their turn in the stairwell who each clutch dossiers under their arms (how I have come to loathe these cattle call visites). The proprietaire inspects their documents. A narrator provides commentary in voice over: "Their revenue corresponds to four times the monthly rent. This is good; but not good enough. They present a letter from Mathieu's parents, who will serve as the guarantors. This is good; but not good enough. Mathieu and Coralie have planned ahead; they produce letters from Coralie's parents, grandparents, and Mathieu's great-grandmother. This is good. But not good enough." The owner goes on to conduct a medical exam to be sure they are both in good health "so as not to find himself with unpaid rent." They are both healthy. This is good. But not good enough. The sketch then devolves into the kind of porno humor the French find so delightful, and it ends with the couple being rejected because Coralie makes too much noise when she climaxes. Mathieu and Coralie leave, dejected.
In reality, you're more likely to experience rudeness on the part of the real estate agent -- assuming you can even get an appointment, since the good apartments will often be shown once and only once, and likely at a time of day when you can't see it, say, in the middle of the workday.
Or you will chance upon a particulier, one of the coveted apartments being rented directly through the proprietor, for which there is even more competition because of the absence of agency fees. You visit, the apartment is wonderful, you give the owner a copy of your dossier (you carry many photocopies around with you in a folder, the same folder everyone else is carrying), and you leave with that sinking feeling in your stomach that you will not get the place, even though you have jumped through all the necessary hoops.
Sure enough, two days later, the text message comes: "Sorry, I didn't accept your dossier, I took someone else who presented themselves before you." You gnash your teeth -- why was your time even wasted? Why were your hopes even raised, if after all that it came down to a question of who was there first?
It's an owner's market, my boss, an Englishman, tells me, when I complain one day in the midst of my search. They want to be careful who they accept, because it's very difficult to kick someone out if they're not paying the rent, he said.
Yes, but that's true in New York as well, I countered. It can take months to evict someone, and it's quite costly. It doesn't adequately explain why one dossier will be accepted and another won't be.
Finally, it comes down to who you know. Everyone I know here who has a nice place found it through their network of family, friends, and acquaintances.
This may sound naive, but I have to say, when it comes to apartment hunting, I prefer American frankness to French hypocrisy.