Paris, Saint-Malo, Biarritz and Annecy Used the New Powers First

Registration First, Then the Cap

The legislation passed by the Assemblée nationale in November 2024 — named for its rapporteur, deputy Annaïg Le Meur — created two distinct instruments that communes can adopt independently or together. The first is a mandatory local registration number, without which a meublé de tourisme (a furnished property let for short stays to tourists) cannot legally be advertised. The second is a quota: a ceiling on the number of days per year that a primary residence may be let, and an absolute cap on how many non-primary-residence units a commune will permit. Cities that already had informal pressure on their housing stock moved to activate both within months of the law taking effect.

What Each City Did

Paris was the most straightforward case. The French capital had operated its own registration system for years before Le Meur, requiring every host to display a local registration number on every listing. The 2024 law gave that requirement statutory teeth nationwide and allowed Paris to reinforce it. Platforms including Airbnb and Booking.com are now required by national law to verify and display registration numbers and to delist non-compliant properties automatically. Paris also enforced, and the new law confirmed, the existing national rule that a principal residence may be let for no more than 120 nights per calendar year — a limit the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques tracks through the declarations hosts are required to file.

Saint-Malo, in Brittany, is a sharper illustration of what the quota instrument can do in a smaller coastal town. The walled port city had watched second-home conversion accelerate through the early 2020s as post-COVID movement — documented in the notaires' price series and INSEE data on second-home ownership — pushed buyers toward Atlantic coastal towns within reach of the ferry routes. The municipality moved in early 2025 to introduce a local registration obligation for all meublés de tourisme, primary and secondary alike, as a precondition for any cap enforcement. The registration requirement meant that for the first time the commune had a count of total units, broken down by housing type, on which to base its quota decisions.

Biarritz, in the Basque Country, faced a structurally similar problem: a resort town where short-term letting income significantly exceeds long-term rental yields, creating a persistent incentive to withdraw housing from permanent occupation. The municipality applied registration requirements in the first quarter of 2025 and signalled its intention to use the new quota powers to limit secondary-residence meublés de tourisme to a share of total housing stock in each quartier (urban district). The mechanism is the one the loi Le Meur permits: communes in tense housing-market zones may set a proportional ceiling, district by district, rather than a single citywide number.

Annecy, in Haute-Savoie, presents a slightly different geography. The lakeside city is surrounded by Alpine municipalities where furnished tourist letting of secondary residences has long been the default income model for ski-season properties. Annecy proper activated registration requirements in line with the new national framework and began tracking the ratio of meublés de tourisme to total residential units by neighbourhood — the data step that precedes any quota ordinance. The surrounding ski-belt communes are watching: the law allows smaller municipalities below the threshold that triggers automatic quota powers to opt in by deliberation of their council.

Why These Four and Not Others

The common thread is not size but housing-market tension. Paris, Saint-Malo, Biarritz and Annecy all sit in what French planning designates as zones tendues — areas where the gap between housing supply and demand is formally recognised and where additional regulatory instruments are unlocked. The loi Le Meur text published in the Journal officiel makes the zone tendue classification a trigger for the stronger quota powers, which is why coastal resort towns and Alpine cities act earlier than inland rural communes, where the same letting activity may be economically welcome rather than displacement-causing. The instrument exists in both cases; the incentive to use it does not.