I write a new home's brochure for the day its buyer collects the keys, because that is the day every sentence in it gets checked.
I am chief marketing and customer officer of Valcerne Habitat, a residential developer listed in Paris and headquartered in Lyon. We build mainly apartments, in and around Lyon, the northern Alps, Toulouse, Montpellier and Provence. In 2025 we recorded 3,140 home reservations and revenue of €1.02 billion. I am responsible for marketing, pricing analysis, digital sales and our relationship with every buyer from reservation to the end of the two-year warranty period. I sit on the executive committee and report to our chief executive, Arnaud Ferrandel; our sales network has its own head.
I began in 1998 as a sales adviser in a developer's sales pavilion in Grenoble, selling apartments that existed only as plans and a scale model. I then ran marketing for a Paris-region developer and, from 2008, residential marketing and sales for a listed Belgian developer in Brussels through the financial crisis. In 2014 I came back to Lyon to run customer relations and handovers at Valcerne, a job most marketers avoid, answering for the gap between what we had sold and what buyers found. I ran marketing strategy from 2017 and have led the combined function since January 2021.
Since then four questions have taken most of my time. How should a developer sell homes when its buyers' borrowing costs have roughly quadrupled in two years? What may we promise about a neighbourhood that other people will finish? Which environmental claims about a new building can we prove, now that European consumer rules have tightened? And when should neighbours be asked for their view, if asking is to change anything? Each answer has cost something, and the cases here say what.
Earlier buyers given the new price
When we cut prices by an average of 8% on three programmes in 2023, we gave the same reduction to the 163 households who had already reserved there, at a cost of €3.9 million. Cancellations on those programmes fell from 31% to 12%.
A district's promises sorted into three columns
At Clos-Ferraud in Vénissieux we separate what our contract delivers from what a public body has decided and what is only under discussion. Written complaints about missing amenities fell from 64 in six months of 2022 to nine in all of 2025.
A green range name retired early
We withdrew the Valcerne Clairière name and its low-carbon claim from 38 programmes in March 2025, eighteen months before the EU rules on generic environmental claims applied, and published a measured data sheet for every building instead.
Fewer defects on the day of the keys
Since 2016 we postpone a handover when an inspection before completion finds more than ten open defects per home. The average recorded at handover has fallen from 23 per home in 2014 to 7.4 in 2025.
Current focus
I am preparing the 2027 launch of 268 homes on a former printing works in Villeurbanne, the first site where we opened a project room for neighbours nine months before filing for a permit. I am also replacing design-stage carbon estimates on our building data sheets with as-built measurements as each programme completes.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking a further executive appointment. I would consider one non-executive seat outside residential development, in an organisation whose standing depends on customer trust, consumer law and local consent, subject to my chief executive's agreement and a conflict review by our legal director. I accept a small number of speaking invitations and peer exchanges each year.