Change of use: the real key to Airbnb in France's big cities (and why it is paid in commercialité)

Change of use comes under the French housing code: it protects housing. Turning a home into a tourist rental in a commune that has introduced the regime requires a municipal authorisation, personal or attached to the premises depending on the case. Change of destination comes under the planning code: it concerns the nature of the premises (housing, retail, offices, hotel accommodation…) under the local plan (PLU). A project may require one, the other, or both — and most refusals stem from confusing the two regimes.

Historically reserved for communes of over 200,000 inhabitants and the inner Paris suburbs, the regime has been extended: the law of 19 November 2024 now lets a very large number of communes introduce it. In practice, Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nice, Strasbourg, Biarritz and the Basque Country, Saint-Malo, Annecy, La Rochelle and a list that grows every year require a prior authorisation to rent out an entire home short-term outside the primary residence. Without it, no valid registration number — and fines in the tens of thousands of euros.

In the tightest cities, the authorisation is conditional on compensation: creating a home equivalent to the one you remove from the housing stock. In practice, almost nobody builds a home to compensate for their own — you buy commercialité: the rights of an owner who is converting commercial premises or offices into housing. Their operation becomes your compensation; your change-of-use file designates their premises. Change of use is therefore paid, in reality, at the price of commercialité: roughly €500 to over €5,000 excl. VAT per m² in Paris depending on the arrondissement and the seller's status — and twice the floor area in the reinforced compensation sector when the seller is private.

You often hear about a “commercialité exchange”. It does not exist: no marketplace, no quotation, no official grid. Both the sale and the purchase are negotiated over the counter, file by file, between two owners who do not know each other — hence considerable price gaps on comparable deals. Access to counterparties, legal verification (sector, ratio, exact destination of the premises) and synchronising the two files are what a specialised intermediary is for. That is our business, on the buy side as on the sell side, success-based only — with a price simulator by arrondissement to frame your deal in two minutes.

In central Paris, compensation can cost more than the property itself — the tourist-rental project then makes no economic sense. Three alternatives: a change of destination of non-residential premises (shop, offices) to hotel-type accommodation — no housing touched, so no compensation, an authorisation attached to the walls, our success-based core business; long-term rental or the mobility lease, outside the scope of change of use; or a sale at yield value to a buyer able to operate legally. The right choice is a calculation — exactly what we quantify in the free assessment.