In Paris, almost every flat sits inside a co-ownership — a copropriété. Which means that before you touch a thing, your project isn't yours alone to decide: it also answers to a set of rules, a managing agent, and an assembly of fellow owners. For an overseas owner this set-up is often a surprise — and one of the first places a renovation hits a snag. Here's the essential, jargon kept to a minimum.
The co-ownership rules: read them first
The règlement de copropriété is the rulebook for the building. It separates the parties privatives — your lot, where you're broadly free — from the parties communes: the load-bearing walls, the façade, the street-facing windows, the communal risers, sometimes the floors and ceilings between lots. Plenty of owners find out too late that their windows, their front door or the look of their balcony count as common property — and aren't theirs to change at will. The rules can also rule out certain uses, short-term letting among them. That's why I always say to read it before you buy, alongside the promesse de vente.
Which works need the assembly's sign-off
The simple version: anything touching the common parts or the outward look of the building needs, as a rule, to be approved by the general assembly of owners. That covers opening up a load-bearing wall, moving or altering shared supplies and drains, changing windows visible from the street, putting air-conditioning on the façade, or reworking a balcony. What stays strictly inside your own lot — a new kitchen, repainting, a new interior floor, moving a non-structural partition — generally needs no sign-off, subject to what your own rules say.
Depending on the works, the assembly votes by different majorities. The point for you isn't to learn those majorities by heart: it's to know, before you commit, which of your works hang on a vote — because a vote takes preparing, and sometimes months.
The syndic and the assembly, in plain terms
The syndic is the building's manager: it keeps the books, calls in the charges, runs the general assembly, and carries out its decisions. The general assembly meets at least once a year; that's where the budget, the communal works and the approvals get voted through. As an owner you have a vote there — and it's also where building-wide works get decided that can land on your bill (façade, roof, lift), sometimes with nothing to do with your own project.
The tricky part when you live abroad
All of this assumes you're informed and present — both hard at 6,000 kilometres. Three habits help. First, get hold of the last three sets of assembly minutes and have them read before you buy: they tell you about works on the way, disputes, the state of the building. Second, give someone your proxy to vote in your name at the assemblies you can't attend. Third, plan for the lead times: if your renovation touches the common parts, build in from the start the time it takes to win approval — or watch the works stall until the next assembly.
This is exactly the kind of reading I do for clients: picking out, in the rules and the minutes, what your project hangs on, flagging what will have to go before the assembly, and lining up your decisions so nothing blindsides you. I don't vote for you and I don't run these procedures — I make them legible, and I warn you in time.
For what happens at the point of purchase, see "How to read a promesse de vente from abroad". To set it all in the wider journey, see the guide "Renovating a Paris apartment from abroad".
— Paris, May 2026. Charles-Eric Guerrier.