Paris has residential rent controls. They were put in place on a test basis starting on July 1, 2019 and, broadly speaking, they limit what rents can be charged on a per-square-metre basis according to the neighbourhood, rental type (unfurnished or furnished), number of bedrooms, and the period of construction.
Since then, there have been various studies examining their effects. Here's a recent one by Apur. In this report, the authors conclude that over the six-year period, the controls moderated rents by -5% compared to where they would have been had they been unfettered. Importantly, they also conclude that the rent control policies have had no meaningful impact on the city's rental supply.
However, it's important to point out that "rental supply" means the supply of rental homes in buildings already built. The report does not talk about new construction. And as I understand it, the rent controls are more flexible for new construction. There's also a complément de loyer (rent supplement) that developers and landlords can charge for new builds that are energy efficient and offer exceptional comfort or amenities.
Regardless of the specifics, it's interesting to think about rent controls in a city like Paris. The central part of the region, Paris proper, is already built out and constructs very little new housing each year. By some estimates, the net amount (factoring in existing units being demolished) is only something like 1,500 to 2,000 units annually. And if you consider new market-rate units, it's an even smaller number.
From a policy standpoint, this presumably means you're a lot less concerned about new housing supply — at least in the central neighbourhoods — and more concerned about the overall affordability of the existing supply.
Cover photo by Salomé Watel on Unsplash
I sat next to a software developer at my friend's wedding a few weeks ago, and I figured I would ask him the obvious question: "What percentage of the code that you write today is now being done through AI?" At first he was reticent to answer, but eventually he told me that it's, like, the majority. That sounded right.
I then decided to pull out my phone and force upon him something that I've been vibe coding. I'm sure he found this boring, but his response was interesting nonetheless. He said, "This is the future of software. It is going to be both highly personalized and built by actual users. And because of this, it's going to be better software." In other words, accountants will build what they need, photographers will build what they need, and real estate developers will build what they need.
What I showed him was Propeur.com, a residential property management platform tailored toward small Ontario landlords that I have been building for my own purposes and as a tool that Globizen can use for its infill rental projects. It's still early days and there are bugs to work out, but here's what you can do so far:
Add your rental properties and receive a Monday morning email with a summary of what happened over the last week and what's on the horizon.
Manage tenants and rental units, including move-in and move-out dates, and all of the critical dates surrounding rental increases.
Automatically track current debt balances and maturity dates.
Store all relevant property documents, and have them automatically labeled and categorized in the appropriate folders.
Create a public property profile for both on-market and off-market units (here's an example).
Sync bank accounts and categorize expenses by property and unit.
Export transactions to a CSV, filtered by property, date, and revenue/expense category.
Log maintenance requests and automatically email them out to a contractor or maintenance person (the next step will likely be some kind of tenant portal).
Export tax reports at the end of the year.
Again, it's still very much a preliminary beta release and there are certainly bugs. But already, I find myself using it almost daily. If you're a small landlord in Ontario and would like to give it a spin, you can sign up here. I'd love to get your feedback on the platform. And if it's something you find useful, please feel free to drop me a line and I'll buy you a coffee.
Cover photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
The conventional beauty of the internet and software was that it had effectively zero marginal cost. That is to say, it might cost you a lot of money to create something initially, but once created, you could scale it very quickly, more or less for free. This has been a great way to make money, and it's the opposite of something like real estate development where everything takes forever and costs too much money.
But the landscape has shifted rapidly. Dror Poleg wrote this week that intelligence, rather than software, is now eating the world. The fundamental difference is that while software had zero marginal cost, AI does not. When we ask AI something, it has to reason it out in real time, and in order to do that, it needs to consume lots of energy and compute.
As a result of the above, we are seeing something we’ve never seen before: Software demand is beginning to bump into physical constraints. The world is struggling to allocate sufficient land to build data centers and to produce and redirect the energy required to meet AI demand. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are spending an unprecedented amount of money to build these new data centers, but they are approaching their financial limits. Google has recently partnered with Blackstone, one of the world’s largest landlords, to expand and expedite the construction of new data centers.
All this sounds like great news for real estate developers. Finally, order has been restored in the universe: If you want to grow your business, you need to pay more rent; the natural scarcity of land is asserting itself. Instead of software eating the world, it is now the world that is eating the free cash flow generated by software companies.
However, these specific dynamics may only remain true in the short to medium term. As dystopian as it may seem, there is indeed an organized and real effort to bring data centres into space. Some of the advantages of this include abundant, continuous energy and zero land-use constraints to fetter growth. Now, I don't know enough to comment on the feasibility or timing, but it certainly sounds like great fodder for a Black Mirror episode.