Les Gets gives unregistered holiday lets 60 days to comply — or face the fines

The letters went out quietly, by post, to addresses extracted from the major letting platforms. The mairie of Les Gets does not use the word "investigation" in its bulletin municipal, but the implication of its June notice is plain: it has been watching the listings, it has checked them against its meublé de tourisme register, and a significant share of owners letting their apartments commercially do not appear in it. The 60-day compliance window is the grace period. After that, inspections begin.

The rule, restated

Since the loi Miot came into force in 2023, any property let as a furnished tourist accommodation — even occasionally, even if managed by an agency — requires a declaration to the commune and a national registration number. That number must appear on every listing on every platform. The obligation applies regardless of whether the owner lives in France, regardless of how many nights per year the property is let, and regardless of whether the platform handles the booking.

For properties in zone tendue communes — which includes every significant resort in this newspaper's territory — an additional rule applies: furnished tourist lets require prior authorisation (autorisation de changement d'usage) if the property is a principal residence let for more than 120 nights a year, and automatic authorisation if it is a second home, but the declaration and registration number are required in all cases.

Why the crackdown now

The timing is not accidental. The EU's short-term rental regulation — in force across member states since the end of May — now compels platforms to share letting data with national authorities on request. Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and their peers must provide host-level data, including addresses and earnings, when a commune asks. The databases that Les Gets now holds, drawn from platform compliance reports, are the first comprehensive picture of commercial letting activity the commune has ever had — and the gap between platform listings and registered meublés is, by several officials' accounts, startling.

"We are not trying to penalise owners who had no idea this existed. We are trying to create a register that reflects reality — because we cannot enforce housing policy on data that is thirty percent incomplete."

Adjoint chargé du logement, Les Gets

The sanctions

The fine for letting without a registration number starts at €450 per infringement. Repeat infringements — separate bookings, each technically a separate offence — can be cumulated. For properties in a commune that requires a changement d'usage (any zone tendue commune, for the second-home exception), operating without authorisation carries a fine of up to €50,000 plus a day-rate until compliance. Several neighbouring communes have already levied such fines; Les Gets is the first in the Portes du Soleil to confirm it will follow.

The platform side has its own teeth. Under the EU regulation, platforms that host listings without a valid registration number in a country that requires one may face fines at the platform level — which gives Airbnb and its competitors a commercial incentive to delist non-compliant properties without waiting for the commune to ask.

What owners need to do

• Declare via the national portal. The meublé de tourisme declaration is made at service-public.fr. The process takes fifteen minutes for a French-speaker; allow a little longer and use a browser translator for the detail. The registration number is issued immediately.
• Declare via the commune. Les Gets (and Morzine, Les Gets' near-neighbour in Portes du Soleil) additionally require a paper declaration to the mairie. Download the cerfa 14004 form from the mairie's site and submit it with a copy of your title deed.
• Update your listings. Once you have the number (format: FR-XXXXXXXX-YYYYYYYY), add it to the body of every platform listing. Airbnb has a dedicated registration field; Booking.com requires it in the property description if the field is not yet mandatory on your account.
• Tell your agency. If a property management company handles your bookings, confirm they have the number and are displaying it. The obligation sits with the owner, not the agency.

The broader pattern

Les Gets is not an outlier. Chamonix has been enforcing registration requirements for two years and has levied several of the maximum-level fines. Val d'Isère issued its own compliance notices in January. Samoëns and Morzine are at various points in the same process. The direction — more data, more enforcement, louder consequences — is now set by European-level regulation rather than individual commune politics, and the communes no longer need to develop their own investigative capacity; the platform data arrives on request. Owners who have treated this as bureaucratic background noise should treat June's Les Gets letter as the end of that era.

The full legal framework, commune by commune

The obligation to register a meublé de tourisme comes in layers, and the layer that applies depends on the commune's classification. Every commune in the Portes du Soleil group falls within zone tendue under the 2023 extension — which means the full stack of obligations is in force:

The 120-night cap applies only to a property that is the owner's principal residence (résidence principale). Second homes — which describes the vast majority of let properties in the Portes du Soleil — have no night cap under current law, but they do require the changement d'usage declaration, and some communes are moving to quota systems that cap the total number of second-home lets regardless of nights. Annecy introduced a quota in 2024; several Haute-Savoie resort councils are watching the legal challenges against it before deciding whether to follow.

The EU short-term rental regulation, demystified

Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on short-term accommodation rental data, in force since May 2024 with implementation through May 2026, does three things that matter to owners:

• Platforms must verify registration numbers. When a member state requires registration (France does), the platform is legally obliged to collect and display the number and to remove listings where the number is invalid.
• Platforms must share data on request. National authorities and competent local authorities (including communes) may request activity data — addresses, letting frequency, annual turnover — for any host. The sharing is not optional and is not subject to the host's consent once the authority has made the request.
• Single digital entry point. Each member state must provide a national portal for registration; France's is the service-public.fr system already in operation. The regulation standardises the number format and the data fields, which is why you now see a mandatory "registration number" field appearing on Airbnb's host dashboard regardless of whether you previously filled it in.

What agents and management companies need from you

If your property is managed by an agency — booking management, key holding, cleaning coordination — the contractual responsibility for platform compliance still sits with you as the owner. The platforms' terms of service are clear: the host is the owner, and the obligation is the owner's. Your agency should be nudging you to register; if they are not, ask why, and ask to see their compliance policy for the properties they manage. The enforcement environment makes an unregistered property a liability for the agency too, but their internal policies vary.

What your agency or management company needs from you: the registration number (from service-public.fr), confirmation of the commune declaration (copy of the cerfa receipt), and confirmation of whether a changement d'usage has been filed. If you cannot answer these three questions, the 60-day window is the time to answer them. The mairie's urbanisme desk in Les Gets and the equivalent in Morzine both have English-speaking staff available on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for exactly this kind of enquiry — and the conversation is much less unpleasant before the inspection than after it.

Related: the taxe d'habitation surcharge — the other political instrument targeting second-home owners, and the 90/180 rule that determines how much time you can spend in your compliant property.

[Preview edition — this article is illustrative while Issue No. 1 is in preparation.]