Paris Revealed

by Stephen Clarke

  * This bad signposting, I was later told, is due to the fact that the train station is in Meudon but the Arp museum is in neighbouring Clamart, and Meudon doesn’t see why it should put up signposts to someone else’s museums. Vive la bureaucratie française.

  ** Plenty of Parisian artists are obsessed with gazing at their own navel, but at least Arp put it to creative use.

  *** The ‘temple’ quote is from the museum’s website. Funnily, on the page dedicated to the floor plan, the website also says that, ‘The location of artworks is updated every morning, before the Museum opens, based on information from the previous evening.’ It’s as if the crush in the museum is so great that, like glaciers scraping down a mountain valley, the crowds shove paintings along the corridors.

  The ad said ‘furnished’, but it didn’t specify how furnished. Apartment-hunting in Paris requires the attention to detail of a micro-biologist.

  12

  APARTMENTS

  On croit souvent qu’un appartement est bas de plafond, alors qu’il est tout simplement haut de plancher.

  (You often think that an apartment has low ceilings, when in fact it just has high floors.)

  PIERRE DAC, FRENCH COMEDIAN

  One foot on the ground

  WHAT SHOULD you do if you like Paris so much that you want to become a more frequent Parisian? Or even a permanent one? Lots of people decide to do so, and go native by buying a place here. These include French people, too. Many of them live in the deepest, darkest provinces but have a Parisian pied-à-terre, or ‘foot on the ground’—a rather painful image, as if they are stuck halfway while trying to disembark from a rowing boat. And for the unprepared, buying an apartment in Paris can feel a lot like that.

  Even native Parisians often find buying property in their city a stressful, confusing process, because it is a relatively new experience for them as a sociological group. Until only ten or fifteen years ago, renting was so easy and cheap that buying wasn’t something that Parisians usually bothered about. Most middle-class couples were happy to pay the monthly rent, and spend what savings they had on a résidence secondaire—the weekend/holiday house on the coast, just outside Paris, or au pays in the region of France where one of their families came from. Then, once they’d dragged the kids through the education system, they simply stopped paying their Parisian rent (usually by passing the lease on to a family member) and retired to the résidence secondaire, which had long been paid for. It was a gloriously cosy system that, ever since the building craze under Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century, had divided Paris in two—the rich who owned the apartment buildings, and the less affluent, but often comfortably off, who rented.

  Even twenty-five years ago, a typical Parisian estate agency was a narrow, dingy shopfront with a few handwritten cards in the window. The atmosphere inside was dusty and paper-swamped, like the office of a solicitor on the verge of retirement. Often they were just that—lots of properties were sold by notaires acting for families who’d inherited them and couldn’t decide which brother or sister was going to live there. Commissions on sales were huge—up to 10 per cent—so there was no need to achieve a high turnover. Four or five family-sized apartments a year could provide a very healthy second income for a solicitor. Apartments could moulder for weeks or months in a file on a notaire’s desk, waiting for one of his clients to mention that they might want to invest in property.

  Buying to rent wasn’t attractive, either, because tenants’ rights had been set in stone by a post-war law aimed at repairing the trauma of the Occupation. From now on, it was announced on 1 September 1948, the French were going to occupy their rented homes at the same rent practically ad infinitum. The loi de 1948 fixed maximum rents, stipulated that rental agreements were completely open-ended, and that tenants could be evicted only if the landlord or landlady intended to live in the apartment or give it to his or her children—although it was impossible to budge any tenant over sixty-five or on a low income. And even when eviction was possible, the owner had to give six months’ notice and offer the tenants ‘equivalent’ housing elsewhere, the notion of equivalence being so vague that a tenant could hang on for years claiming that the new place wasn’t as conveniently located, didn’t have a bidet etc., etc. And the worst thing for landlords was that these ‘1948’ tenancies could be passed on from parent to child or sibling to sibling. Renting out was little more than charity work.

  Given these conditions, many owners gave up and sold the apartments, either ‘occupés’ (and therefore much cheaper), or directly to the occupants, who had first refusal anyway. Meanwhile, almost no new apartments were coming on to the rental market—why build and rent out a place if you knew that it was going to be squatted at a government-capped rate?

  It was therefore to try and reboot the rental market that, in 1986, the French government overturned the loi de ’48—without pulling the carpet out from under existing tenants’ feet. Now, if a tenant moved out, the owners could charge what they liked for a new lease rather than adhering to a capped rent. But instead of freeing up the rental market, this only created a new stagnation. Rents rose so sharply that prospective new tenants had to provide almost impossible guarantees—this was when it first became common for young people to turn up at rental agencies carrying a dossier stuffed with their own and their parents’ pay slips, the deeds to their grandparents’ country house, a letter from their boss guaranteeing the company’s survival for the next twenty years, and a promise to sell their kidneys if they were late with the rent.

  Meanwhile the new rent-hiking policy sent speculators knocking at the doors of Paris’s richer arrondissements. Did the family by any chance have an apartment building that it wanted to get rid of? If the answer was yes, a couple of months later, men in suits would be tramping up and down staircases, bribing tenants to leave or forcing them out by doing renovation work—one of the few escape clauses in the 1948 law was that tenants could be removed during travaux and their rent increased because the apartment had gained significantly in confort.

  As planned, the number of 1948-type rentals began to fall, but even this legal eviction policy didn’t always prove efficient because of the high number of old (and therefore unmovable) tenants, and the sheer doggedness of Parisians whose whole lifestyle was based on a rent that had barely increased since their mum and dad moved into the apartment forty years earlier.

  Abandoning the plan to rent out whole buildings at extortionate rates, many of the speculators began to cut their losses and sell individual apartments. At last, private ownership entered the Parisian consciousness and, with renting less secure and banks offering fixed-rate mortgages, it suddenly became very fashionable to buy. In short, Paris went from no market at all to a boom in only a few years. And unlike an internet bubble or mobile-phone bonanza, it was a small, finite market—Paris is only so big, and there are only so many apartments that can be bought. Until France decides to move its capital elsewhere, or foreigners lose interest in the city’s sex appeal, property is going to be highly sought-after.

  There is good news, however, and it is twofold. First, there is a fairly high turnover in apartment sales. And secondly, not all of Paris has so far revealed its potential charme and been gentrified out of reach.

  The question is, how to cash in on these good tidings?

  Location, location, location*

  The first consideration is, of course, can I afford to buy a pied-à-terre? And if you look in the estate agents’ windows in the parts of town that attract the most visitors, the answer would probably be no. But that, quite frankly, is not a problem, because those areas have a major disadvantage—do you really want to come to Paris only to sit in the local café with your morning croissant and listen to people at the other tables saying things like, ‘Avez-vous du normal tea?’ and ‘Vous n’avez pas de cappuccinos?’ Even if your lack of linguistic skills means that you might want to say something similar yourself, it’d be nice to be the only one doing so. Some cafés in the central
arrondissements—especially the 6th—have more customers reading the International Herald Tribune than Le Monde, and waiters who will immediately address you in English. You might as well be in your local fake French café.

  In any case, unless you’re very rich, the only affordable apartments in these arrondissements will be the top-floor chambres de bonne, the old servants’ quarters, most of which have now been converted into studios. These can seem remarkably cheap, until you realize that they’re up six flights of stairs and that your neighbours are all students, who are so relieved to have escaped from chez Maman et Papa that they live as wildly, noisily and nocturnally as possible. Combine these factors with the statistic about top-floor apartments being the easiest to burgle (the thieves creep across the rooftops) and the fact that many chambres de bonne share a toilet on the landing (even if you don’t have to share, your landing is still going to smell like a public convenience) and you might decide that a posh arrondissement is not for you after all. Besides, there are some fairly central neighbourhoods (and let’s face it, Paris is so small that most of it could be described as ‘fairly central’) that are safe, attractive, affordable and very Parisian …

  Double agents

  When looking to buy a Parisian apartment, the easiest solution is probably to go into one of the estate agencies, sit down and tell your life story. Well, that’s what it will feel like, because what the agents usually do is spend ten minutes or so taking your name (which, if you’re foreign, you will have to spell several times before they get it right), your mobile number, home number, work number, email address and the shoe size of your uncle’s donkey. Once this ritual is over, the agent might well inform you that the apartment you saw in their shop window is now sold (it was probably sold months ago, but looks good so they leave it in there as bait), but they have several ‘similar’ properties, which all turn out to be totally dissimilar.

  The agent will then promise to call you on all your phone numbers, email you and send a singing telegram as soon as something comes in.

  Which, to be fair, they probably will, about a year later, when you have already moved into your new Parisian apartment. This happened to me once, and I told the agent he was too late. But he kept ringing for about another two years, at one point even saying, ‘Oh well, maybe you’ll be thinking of moving again soon.’

  There are, of course, agents in Paris who specialize in dealing with non-Parisian buyers, and whose training includes lessons in how to be less Parisian. The trouble with these is that they usually sell apartments in the most tourist-heavy parts of Paris, and assume that foreign clients will want to visit the Louvre, the Panthéon or the Pont Neuf every morning on their way to the boulangerie.

  Perhaps the worst thing about Parisian estate agents, though, especially for a buyer who is not au fait with the complexities of the Parisian market, is that if an apartment has any kind of major flaw—and they often do—the agent is there to hide the fact. Of course, we all know that that is an estate agent’s basic function in any city in the world, but in Paris they can actually get away with it. If a British estate agent tells you that a house is leaning at a 45-degree angle ‘to let more light into the ground-floor windows’ or that ‘Yes, the back garden has got 10 yards shorter since that storm but the council is going to stop the cliff erosion next week,’ the lies will be revealed as soon as you get the surveyor’s report. In France, though, there is no surveyor’s report. As long as the subsidence isn’t caused by termites, asbestos or lead paint, the buyer will remain in the dark about any inherent problems with the building.

  I once visited a building that had a green-black stain running down half the façade, from about the third floor to street level, on either side of the gutter downpipe. When I expressed concern about this, the agent said that the syndic (the building’s management company) was going to repair it—it was just a leaky gutter. Inside the building, there were deep cracks in the walls of the stairwell, but again I was assured that the syndic was on the case.

  I visited the apartment, which was fine in itself, and asked to see the latest compte rendu de réunion des copropriétaires (the report written by the syndic after every annual owners’ meeting, which has to be made available to potential buyers). The agent said he would send it, but ‘quite honestly there was nothing interesting in it’, and in any case, I really ought to make an offer straight away—he had several other clients interested, including one who was coming up specially from Marseille to re-visit the apartment that very afternoon, and was probably going to buy it.

  This was, of course, a tactic straight out of Chapter One of Selling to Gullible Idiots, so I trusted my instincts and said merci but non merci. But, just out of interest, I hunted around and found the building’s syndic. I called them, saying I was a potential buyer, and the person on the other end of the phone actually laughed. The syndic was, she said, in the process of tearing up that building’s management contract. The owners could never agree amongst themselves to do any repairs, the façade was about to collapse on to passers-by, City Hall had already threatened legal action, and anyone buying an apartment there right now might as well throw their money in the Seine, which was where half the building would end up if things didn’t get better very quickly.

  Which was not exactly what the agent had told me.

  Neighbourhoods can have their own surprise drawbacks, too, of course. A street lined with cafés can seem picturesque in the daytime, but be transformed into a yelling, music-thudding, bottle-smashing battlefield at night. It is no longer true that the French know how to hold their alcohol. They’ve discovered binge drinking and are suffering all the consequences, as are the people who live where they have their binges.

  On the other hand, the office building next door to the apartment you’re visiting can be as silent as newly fallen snow in the evening but shudder and hum like a battleship’s engines on a summer’s day when you want to sit on your balcony reading Proust. The agent will know this and make sure you visit when the apartment, and the neighbourhood, is très calme.

  Now I am not saying that all Parisian agents are dishonest, of course. No doubt, there are as many helpful, truthful agents as there are in any other city. It’s just that, like all people paid on commission, they can be tempted to bend the truth slightly to make a sale. All the more so because even with green sludge covering half a building’s facade, there will be someone willing to buy an apartment there.

  Doing it direct

  The way to avoid the clutches of an agent is to buy direct from the owner. The most common way of doing this is to answer one of the ads in the property magazine De Particulier à Particulier (from non-professional to non-professional). The ads also appear on their website, www.pap.fr. If you’re looking to buy, you want the annonces de vente, and if you just want to rent, the locations (as I said earlier, location means rental rather than geographical position).

  In theory, buying direct from the owner is cheaper because of the lack of commission, but some owners are greedy and clearly base their asking prices on ads they have seen in agencies. And there is no reason why an owner should be more honest than an estate agent—after all, the owners are on 100 per cent commission.

  I have heard various sellers’ tales about the scams they pulled to get a buyer. One man lived across the landing from a terribly noisy family. The daughter would stay at home all weekend listening to her radio at full volume, and bad French pop at the decibel level of a 747 taking off can scare away even Parisians. The owner therefore offered the girl a month’s supply of M&Ms if she would agree to turn the music off whenever he was arranging viewings. Sure enough, the following silent Saturday, the place was sold.

  In short, since it is illegal in France to view apartments armed with a lie detector or truth serum, buying a Parisian pied-à-terre is all about instinct. In a way, it’s a lot like falling in love. Either there’s a spark or there’s nothing, and it’s all a matter of taste. If you can fall in love with someone who has green sludg
e running down their face or who stands at a 45-degree angle, then c’est la vie.

  C’est un toilette, ça?

  I recently went on to www.pap.fr and found that, like all things fundamentally Parisian, nothing had changed in the years since I first went hunting for a small apartment.**

  This time, things began smoothly, with a search page. I agreed that I wanted to rechercher un bien (a property), ticked the appartement box, typed in the postcodes that interested me (75003, 75011, 75019—the 3rd, 11th and 19th arrondissements, my own favourite band of central and northeast Paris), chose a maximum surface (area) of 30 square metres, and my idea of a maximum price for a pied-à-terre, remembering not to put commas between zeros because French websites think they’re decimal points, then hit rechercher and got eleven ads—not many, admittedly.

  I immediately realized why there were so few ads—only one of my chosen arrondissements had come up. This wasn’t a serious bug, however, because at the bottom of the list the site tells you how many similar ads are in all the other arrondissements, so you can click there whenever you want.

  The first thing I did was trier les annonces—sort the ads, asking for the most recent first. These are marked annonce nouvelle du … plus the date. I knew from past experience that the ones listed as annonce mise à jour (updated) were probably sold, especially as I was looking for the size of apartment with the quickest turnover—there are investors galore looking to put their savings in stone rather than let the stock market evaporate them away, as well as a whole generation of Parisians trying desperately to evict their stay-at-home student kids into an apartment so they don’t have to keep yelling at them for smoking in the toilet.