Chief Marketing Officer / Europe
Decisions that cost us money and kept our word
- Home reservations
- 3,140
- Valcerne Habitat, 2025, individual and block sales combined
- Company revenue
- €1.02bn
- 2025; recognised as construction progresses, not at reservation
- Defects per home at handover
- 7.4
- Group average, 2025; 23 in 2014
Decisions & consequences
01Giving earlier buyers the price we had cut
In the first half of 2023, individual reservations at Valcerne fell 41% year on year. Average rates on French home loans had risen from a little over 1% at the end of 2021 to above 4%, and a legal ceiling on the total cost of credit, slow to follow market rates, led banks to refuse applications. Cancellations before the notarial deed rose from 14% to 29%. Three programmes launched in 2022 in Lyon's eastern suburbs and in Grenoble were worst affected: of 412 homes, 163 were reserved or signed and 249 sat unsold at prices that no longer cleared. Each unsold month added financing and site costs.
Our head of sales, Julien Castagnède, proposed keeping the published grid and adding incentives: notary fees paid, a free parking space, a fitted kitchen. That would have protected the headline price. I proposed an average 8% cut to the grid, with the same reduction given to the 163 households already committed, deducted from their remaining construction-stage instalments. Our chief financial officer, Sabine Odelin, opposed the extension in writing, citing cost and the precedent for ninety other programmes. Our chief executive approved it in September 2023 on condition that the audit committee reviewed the precedent.
I made one decision I regret. I excluded the 47 buy-to-let investors among the 163, arguing that a tax-led purchase was a different decision. Thirty-eight complained within a month, rightly: they had paid the same price for the same flats. Four months later we extended it to them, for a total cost of €3.9 million.
Gross margin on the three programmes fell from 11.6% to 7.9%. Cancellations there fell from 31% to 12% over the following year, and all 249 unsold homes were reserved by December 2024, against a forecast of twenty-six months under the incentive plan. In 2024 the executive committee made it a group rule that when comparable lots in a building are reduced within twelve months of a reservation, the earlier buyer receives the difference. It cost €2.2 million over eleven programmes in two years.
What I would change is the order of communication: a local property website reported the reduction two days before our letters arrived. I would now telephone every affected household on the day a grid changes, and never again divide the buyers of one building by their reasons for buying.
Sorting the promises made about a new district
Clos-Ferraud is a 1,150-home district on a former foundry site in Vénissieux, developed inside a public development zone. Valcerne is building 860 of the homes in four phases. The first 240 were handed over in spring 2022, and within six months we had 64 written complaints about things the district did not have. Our 2019 brochure, which my own team had approved, spoke of the tram at the foot of the building, a new school, shops and a two-hectare park. The park was secured in the development agreement. The city had decided on the school for 2027. The tram extension had been studied by the metropolitan transport authority but not funded, and no retailer had signed for any ground floor.
With 620 homes still to sell in a falling market, our standing in the district and the sales of three phases were at stake. I withdrew all material for phases 2 to 4 and rewrote every claim into three columns: what Valcerne builds and the sale contract covers; what a public body has formally decided, with the decision and its date; and what is under discussion, quoted in the authority's own published words. The tram moved to the third column. Julien Castagnède expected reservations to fall by 15%. The development company running the zone asked us not to print that the tram was undecided. We printed it, citing their own published timetable.
We also underwrote two ground-floor units for the first residents, a grocery and a café, at a reduced rent for three years, giving up about €1.6 million in rent and fit-out contributions.
Phase 2 reservations in the last quarter of 2022 came in 12% below plan. Between 2023 and mid-2026 we reserved 506 of the remaining 620 homes, and written complaints about missing amenities fell to nine in 2025. When the tram decision was postponed in 2024, the residents' association told a local newspaper that it had been warned. The three-column page has been compulsory for every Valcerne programme since 2023, and our legal director reviews each column before a launch.
The grocery survived; the café closed after eighteen months. I chose its operator for how it would look in our photographs. Had I asked the residents first, I would have learnt that they wanted a pharmacy and a childminding space far more than coffee.
Retiring a green range name before the rules required it
My team launched Valcerne Clairière in 2019 as our low-carbon home, and by 2024 the name appeared on 38 programmes, about two in five of our launches. Early that year I asked our sustainability director, Élodie Garrance, and our legal director to test every environmental statement we made against the European rules then being transposed into French law, which restrict generic claims that cannot be substantiated and forbid presenting a legal requirement as a distinctive feature. They found that 11 Clairière buildings beat the carbon threshold for their permits by 15% or more, 21 by under 10%, and six only narrowly. Two brochures called the insulation bio-sourced; only the roof's was.
The name had value. A panel run by our agency, Atelier Morvel, found that 37% of people looking for a home in Lyon recognised it when prompted, and our sales team put the premium on Clairière lots at about €90 per square metre. Our chief executive proposed keeping the name for the eleven stronger buildings. I argued that no recognised standard stood behind our own threshold, so a name implying excellence would remain a generic claim, and that buyers would read it as a statement about the company. Our audit committee chair asked how we would defend the name to the consumer protection authority, and the chief executive agreed to retire it.
We removed it from all 38 programmes by March 2025, writing off €1.1 million of signage and material across 22 sales pavilions. Each building now has a one-page data sheet: energy class and estimated consumption, embodied carbon against the threshold for its permit year, heating system, bio-sourced content by weight, walking time to rail or tram, and the stage of each figure.
In 2025, homes in buildings at least 15% below their threshold still sold for about €70 per square metre more than comparable homes nearby; for the rest we could measure no premium. One institutional investor cited the data sheet when it bought 148 homes in Montpellier. Every environmental sentence we publish now traces to a field the sustainability director signs.
My mistake was the first five months of data sheets, which showed design-stage carbon estimates without saying so. When one Montpellier building's as-built figure came in 6% worse, we corrected the sheet and wrote to its buyers. The stage should have been printed from the first day.
Postponing a handover rather than delivering a defect list
When I became director of customer relations and handover at Valcerne in 2014, we handed over about 2,300 homes a year with an average of 23 defects recorded per home at the handover visit. Six months later 38% of them were still open, and only 54% of buyers said a year after moving in that they would recommend us. Buyers had a one-year completion warranty, but spent much of that year chasing subcontractors through us.
The delivery dates in our sale contracts were commitments, and our construction director, Patrice Lomberge, treated them as such: a building handed over on time with a long defect list was, in his view, a building delivered. Contractors' final payments and the last stage of our revenue followed the handover. I proposed an inspection of every building by a team outside the construction line before completion, and a rule that a building averaging more than ten open defects per home would be postponed until it fell below that level. Patrice opposed it in a memo to the chief executive, warning of compensation claims, strained subcontractor relations and revenue slipping between quarters. Our chief financial officer shared the revenue concern. The chief executive agreed to a trial on the Toulouse and Montpellier programmes completing in 2016.
The first test came that March: a 186-apartment building in north Toulouse, where the inspection found an average of 19 defects per home. We postponed the handover by five weeks, paid €0.74 million in contractual compensation for buyers' rent and storage, withheld payments from two subcontractors and ended our relationship with one of them.
We gave up money, a quarter's revenue on that building and a relationship Patrice had built over a decade. By 2017 the group average at handover had fallen to nine defects per home, 81% of defects were closed within sixty days, and the share of buyers who would recommend us after a year had risen to 79%. In 2025 the average was 7.4. Postponement became group policy in 2017.
What I would change is the warning we gave. In Toulouse we told buyers three weeks before the planned date, after several had already given notice on their rented homes. We now decide ten weeks ahead, using an inspection at the second-fix stage, and tell buyers in the same week.