What I check before a developer makes a promise to a buyer

Off-plan homes are priced lot by lot, months before anyone can live in them, and the grid set at launch has to survive changes in borrowing costs that the developer cannot control. I work with our head of sales and our finance team on the grid for every programme: floor, outlook, orientation and size, tested against resale prices nearby rather than competitors' launches. When rates rose from 2022, I learnt to watch the indicators that move before reservations do: the share of buyers whose loan applications were refused, cancellations before the notarial deed, and the time between a first visit and a signed reservation. I argue for open price reductions over disguised incentives, and for extending any reduction to households who have already reserved in the same building. I also work with the colleagues who negotiate block sales to social landlords and institutions, so that households buying individually in a mixed building know what tenure their neighbours will have.

Someone buying a new home in a new district is buying a neighbourhood that does not exist yet, and much of it will be delivered by other people: a city deciding on a school, a transport authority deciding on a tram, retailers deciding whether a ground floor is worth renting. I keep those promises apart in everything we publish. What Valcerne builds and the sale contract covers goes in one column. What a public body has formally decided, with its decision and date, goes in a second. What is under discussion goes in a third and is described in the authority's own published words. I also work on what we can do ourselves to make a place usable early, such as underwriting ground-floor uses for the first residents. I have learnt to ask residents what they lack before choosing a tenant for those spaces, rather than choosing the tenant that photographs best.

Claims about energy and carbon have become one of the main legal risks in residential marketing. French law has restricted claims of carbon neutrality since 2023, and the EU directive on empowering consumers for the green transition, which applies from the autumn of 2026, prohibits generic environmental claims a company cannot substantiate and the presentation of what the law requires of everyone as a distinctive feature. I treat those rules as a design brief for our material rather than a check at the end. Every environmental statement Valcerne makes now traces to a field in a building data sheet: energy class and estimated consumption, embodied carbon against the regulatory threshold for that permit, heating system, bio-sourced content, and whether each figure is a design estimate or an as-built measurement. Our sustainability director owns the data and I own how it is said. Our audit committee samples the chain each year.

French planning law requires prior consultation for some public development operations, but a private building permit can usually be filed without asking the neighbours anything; they then have two months from the display of the permit on site to challenge it in court. Developers have tended to respond with a public meeting once the scheme is drawn. I think that is a presentation, and residents recognise it as one. Since 2024 Valcerne has applied a consultation charter I wrote with our development director. On sites above a certain size we open a project room before the massing is fixed, name in advance the choices still open and those that are not, and publish a list of what we changed and what we refused, with reasons. I have learnt to be exact about what is not negotiable, such as the share of social housing a city requires, because vagueness on that point wastes everyone's evenings.

I spent three and a half years responsible for handing over Valcerne's buildings, and I still regard the handover as the real test of our marketing. French buyers of new homes are protected by a one-year completion warranty, a two-year warranty on equipment and a ten-year warranty on the structure, but a protection the buyer has to chase for months does little for a developer's reputation. I introduced inspections before completion and a rule that postpones a building with too many open defects, and I report defect counts per building to our executive committee every quarter. My team stays with a buyer until the end of the two-year warranty, answering for the contractor rather than forwarding letters to them. I also use the handover as research. Buyers' first-year letters tell me which of our sales sentences they remember, and which they believe were untrue.