People are on file because they have not paid their rent or experienced late payments.
It’s the fear of every owner who rents their home: that their tenant doesn’t pay them the rent. More and more press articles report the difficulties many landlords have in collecting the sums owed to them for renting an apartment or house. Often, these people have credit to repay to finance their investment and find themselves without money to meet their obligations. However, taking legal action to assert your rights is long, tedious and, above all, expensive.
Difficult, if not impossible, to attest to the seriousness of the rental candidate during a visit. Only his file concerning his situation and his income can give an idea, without 100% protecting the owner from any incident. Only the Visale guarantee system allows the lessor to limit the risk since the State guarantees the tenant, quickly pays the debts if there are any, then settles the dispute with the tenant. The owner is therefore not harmed. But not everyone can claim this guarantee.
Faced with the increase in unpaid rent, some owners have decided to organize themselves, even if it means breaking the law. Their objective: to draw up a blacklist of bad payers and circulate it to avoid disappointments for other people offering their accommodation for rental. This phenomenon has developed thanks to social networks, on which groups of owners have been created. Above, some do not hesitate to ask if, in their city, tenants should be avoided. A totally illegal but accepted practice. “I’m tired of waiting for the public authorities to act more firmly against bad-paying tenants,” one of them confided to the Figaroanother affirming that “it’s mutual aid, not denunciation”.
On Facebook in particular, various practices exist. Either certain names can be directly disclosed in a publication or comment, or some provide a personal file which they disclose on request, by private message. Some professionals do not hesitate to resort to this type of practice either, as an agent said in Franceinfo : “There are blacklists, of course! Tenants who are blacklisted… We exchange information between us (real estate professionals). And we actually have plenty of groups that allow us to check. “
Prohibited by law, these lists are in the sights of the CNIL but also of Facebook which has said it is committed to deleting the accounts of people who contribute or distribute names. Especially since little or no context on the reasons for unpaid debts is given to the owners, whereas a bad financial situation can happen inadvertently.