Anyone rented from Paris by Heart?

You can find reviews of the company with Google. However, before you commit to a Paris apartment with anyone, you might want to read this article on a possible ban on vacation rentals within the city:

https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/paris-airbnb-laws-ban-ian-brossat

Hard to tell how serious they are about this.

Hard to tell how serious they are about this.

Very serious.

In the first 8 months of this year, the city of Paris fined 111 property owners over 1.3 million euros for operating illegal vacation rentals and forced them to remove their apartments from the short term marketplace. I would confirm that any apartment in which I was interested to rent have the city required, 13 digit registration number clearly visible on its website listing.

This might be an otherwise legitimate business but their apartment inventory could be completely illegal.

I don't know about Paris by Heart, but I've rented four times from Vacation In Paris (vacationinparis.com), a property management company based in New Jersey. Every trip has been perfect - I highly recommend them.

@ Tocard, Do you know how many apartments were removed from the rental market? I know your post refers to 111 owners but I am trying to see if that resulted in more than 111 apartments being removed from the rental market. Agencies seem to have significantly less inventory this year.

Tocard, Do you know how many apartments were removed from the rental market?

To my knowledge, the city did not release the aggregate number of apartments being illegally rented to visitors by these 111 owners. Knowing that the city´s initial enforcement efforts were targeted at those operating multiple apartments, I should think that the total number of apartments forcefully returned to long term lease was in excess of 111.

Dividing the overall fine amount of 1,300,000€ by 111 individuals reveals that each violator paid, on the average, just under 12,000€ of the possible 50,000€ fine allowed by law. As illegal short-term renting is very profitable for owners/investors, the current deterrents may slow but not stop the practice.

It will be interesting to see how these numbers trend for the last half of the year, noting that as small as these fines are, given the number of illegal apartments currently advertised in Paris, enforcement has significantly increased over that of 2017.