Twenty-eight years between the sales pavilion and the handover visit

Mandate

Bring marketing, pricing analysis and the customer relationship from reservation to the end of the warranty period under one executive, and protect the company's standing with buyers through a downturn.

Outcomes

• Extended an average 8% price cut to 163 earlier buyers on three programmes in 2023; cancellations there fell from 31% to 12%.
• Introduced three-column neighbourhood claims, first at Clos-Ferraud, where complaints about missing amenities fell from 64 in six months of 2022 to nine in 2025.
• Retired the Valcerne Clairière name from 38 programmes in March 2025 and published a measured data sheet for every building.
• Wrote the consultation charter applied on seven sites since 2024, none of which has yet faced a third-party appeal against its permit.
• Individual buyers' share of reservations recovered from 38% in 2024 to 46% in 2025, with no disguised incentives used since 2024.

Decisions in context

I was appointed when Arnaud Ferrandel decided that the person answerable for what we promise should also answer for what buyers experience afterwards. The role joined marketing, pricing analysis, digital sales and customer relations for the first time, while the sales network stayed with our head of sales. I had expected to spend my first years on the brand and on digital reservation. From mid-2022 the work was shaped instead by rising rates: individual reservations fell, cancellations doubled and our sales tilted towards social landlords and institutional investors. My decisions in that period concerned how we cut prices, what we said about the districts we were building and which environmental claims we could prove. I present a commercial and customer report to the board each quarter, report to the audit committee on how our claims are substantiated and to the CSR committee on consultation. I do not sit on its board.

Reason for the move

Current appointment.

Mandate

Replace four regional marketing teams and brands with one function, and build a digital route from first enquiry to signed reservation.

Outcomes

• Merged four regional brands into one Valcerne identity by 2019, reducing agency and print spending by €2.3m a year.
• Introduced electronic signature of reservation contracts, used for 71% of reservations during the 2020 lockdowns.
• Raised the share of reservations that began on the company's own website from 18% to 39%.
• Launched the Valcerne Clairière range in 2019, a decision later reversed for the reasons set out in my cases.

Decisions in context

This role brought me back to marketing after three years in customer relations, with a mandate to replace four regional teams, each with its own agency, brochure style and pricing habits, with one function and one brand. I was given the budget to build a proper digital route to reservation, which proved its worth when the 2020 lockdowns closed our sales pavilions and buyers signed reservation contracts electronically from home. I also made two decisions I have since had to revisit. In 2019 my team approved the Clos-Ferraud brochure that spoke of a tram nobody had funded, and in the same year we launched the Clairière range with a low-carbon claim broader than our evidence. Both taught me that a marketing function needs a written rule for what it may promise, and not only a brand guide for how it should look.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief marketing and customer officer when marketing and customer relations were combined.

Mandate

Reduce defects at handover and the time buyers spent chasing them, after our own survey found that only 54% of buyers would recommend Valcerne a year after moving in.

Outcomes

• Cut average recorded defects at handover from 23 per home to nine by 2017.
• Raised the share of defects closed within sixty days to 81%.
• Raised the share of buyers who would recommend Valcerne a year after moving in from 54% to 79%.
• Introduced a monthly construction letter with site photographs for every buyer.

Decisions in context

I took this role knowing it was an unusual move for a marketer. It made me responsible for the visit at which a buyer first walks through the finished home with a site manager and records every defect, and for the year of warranty work that follows. I spent my first months at handovers in all five regions and found that most complaints were not about serious defects but about time: buyers wrote again and again because nobody owned their list. I gave each building a single named coordinator, introduced inspections before completion and, after a hard argument with our construction director, a rule that postponed a handover when too many defects remained. I also started a monthly letter with site photographs, because buyers who had not seen their building for eighteen months arrived at the handover with expectations formed by a brochure.

Reason for the move

Asked to lead marketing and sales strategy.

Mandate

Build a residential marketing and sales function for a developer moving from offices into housing, then sustain sales through the financial crisis.

Outcomes

• Sold 2,240 apartments over five years, including 2009, the weakest year of the period.
• Rewrote sales material around buyers' protections under Belgian law on homes sold before completion.
• Introduced bilingual French and Dutch sales files with a single price grid for each building.
• Reduced reservations cancelled before the deed from 17% in 2009 to 8% in 2012.

Decisions in context

Hallevoort had built offices for thirty years and decided in 2008 to grow in housing; I was hired to build its residential marketing and sales. The financial crisis reached Belgium a fortnight after I arrived. For the next two years our buyers did not know whether their banks would lend, and our advertising, written for a rising market, became a liability. I replaced it with material explaining what Belgian law gave the buyer of a home before completion: the completion bond, staged payments tied to construction and the two acceptances of the finished building. Sales recovered more slowly than our chief executive wanted and faster than the market. I also learnt to work in Dutch, to run sales offices across two language communities and to stand before a board as the person explaining why its forecast was wrong.

Reason for the move

Returned to Lyon for family reasons.

Mandate

Bring research and a consistent pricing method to launches that had been priced by the sales team.

Outcomes

• Built launch price grids from resale data for about 30 programmes.
• Reduced the share of lots repriced within six months of launch from 34% to 12%.
• Set up a panel of 1,200 recent buyers used in product design.
• Promoted to head of marketing for Île-de-France in 2006.

Decisions in context

Ostrelle was the development subsidiary of a mutual banking group, and many of its buyers arrived through the group's branches. When I joined, launch prices were set by the sales team from competitors' launch prices, and a third of lots were repriced within six months. I built a method from nearby resale transactions, adjusted for floor, outlook, orientation and size, and learnt how much of a price grid is judgement that has to be defended. Sales directors wanted quick launches, finance wanted margin, and I wanted a grid we would not have to apologise for. I also set up a panel of recent buyers, which taught me how little a brochure's adjectives meant to them beside floor plans, storage and the walk to the station. By 2006 I was running marketing for the region.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Hallevoort Projects to build a residential marketing and sales function in Belgium.

Mandate

Sell apartments off-plan from the company's sales pavilions, then run the main pavilion.

Outcomes

• Sold 190 apartments personally between 1999 and 2003.
• Ran the sales pavilion for a 140-home programme in south Grenoble, fully reserved before completion.
• Began attending handovers to record which sales claims buyers raised.

Decisions in context

My first job was selling homes that existed as plans, a scale model and a sample kitchen in a prefabricated pavilion beside a building site. I learnt to explain staged payments and the reservation deposit, and to answer questions about light, noise and neighbours that the plans could not settle. The most useful lesson came from a retired couple whose view of the mountains was blocked by the second building of the programme I had sold them. Nothing I had said was untrue, but I had not told them what they most needed to know. From 2000 I ran the pavilion with four advisers and began attending handovers, unofficially at first, to hear what buyers repeated back from our sales conversations. That habit has shaped most of what I have done since.

Reason for the move

Moved to Paris to work in marketing for a larger developer.