The State launches a rental map of France, a small step towards transparency

"The objective of the project, (...) is to have rental indicators for all the municipalities in France", summarized Thursday, during an online presentation, the engineer Basile Pfeiffer, the one of the creators of this card launched by the Ministry of Housing.

Concretely, it is an interactive map of France and available since Friday on the website of the Ministry of Ecological Transition, on which Housing depends: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/carte-des-loyers.

Internet users can zoom in and click on the town of their choice to find out what rent per square meter to expect for an apartment or a house.

Behind this project, discreetly announced in 2019 by the ministry, there is the idea of ​​making the housing market more transparent.

The card must "be usable by everyone, including owners, tenants (or) real estate professionals," Pfeiffer insisted.

The subject of rents is politically sensitive because the question of their supervision regularly resurfaces in a context of continuous rise in property prices, which persists for the time being despite the economic and health crisis.

The cities of Lille and Paris, in particular, have established a cap and several other metropolises, including Lyon and Bordeaux, have just asked the government to do the same.

But the new card does not bring much novelty for large cities. Public observatories already exist and provide benchmark data on rents.

The challenge is rather to establish what the rents are in the rest of France, medium and small towns, as well as rural areas. This represents roughly half of the rented accommodation in the country.

To do this, the creators of the map have compiled around ten million advertisements provided by the major sites active in the sector: Leboncoin, SeLoger and PAP. The start-up PriceHubble also participated in the project.

Unsurprisingly, "rents are high in tourist areas" such as "coastlines and mountain areas," notes researcher Marie Breuillé.

Many blurs

However, the data does not make it possible to distinguish with "certainty" tourist rentals, she notes, like those posted by the AirBnB platform.

This is one of the many blurs on this map, which also does not differentiate between new and old housing. In addition, it only draws a frozen picture of the year 2018, while prices keep changing.

Then, there is "a margin of imprecision since it is only announcements and not signed leases which are observed here", remark to AFP the real estate agent Fabrice Abraham, former leader of the Guy Hocquet network, who welcomes, however, a "step" towards more transparency.

Finally, many municipalities simply do not have data: almost a third do not have an advertisement for an apartment. In these cases, it was necessary to extrapolate from similar municipalities.

With all these inaccuracies, can this map really be of use to owners and their future tenants?

"In principle, it's good to have a device that gives an idea of ​​the market value", admits to AFP David Rodriguez, lawyer with the association of consumers CLCV.

But "it is not rigorous enough" for an owner or a tenant to make his choice, he says, regretting in particular that the card makes the choice to give the rents with the charges included while they vary much depending on the nature and condition of the accommodation.

The creators of the project do not hide that it is only at the experimental stage. It is now up to the public housing information agency, Anil, to see what use to make of it and how to refine it.

"We are still far enough from being able to use these data for (...) housing policy," admits Mr Pfeiffer, who thinks the map could be updated within two years.