The sales adviser who went back to the handover

The first apartment I sold, in February 1999, was a three-room flat on the fourth floor of a building that did not yet exist. I was twenty-three and working in a sales pavilion on a muddy site in the south of Grenoble for Domerac Promotion, a family developer. The buyers were a retired couple who had come for the view of the Belledonne range, and I showed them that view on a drawing. Two years later they collected their keys and found that the second building of the same programme, which had been in the planning documents all along, stood between their balcony and the mountains. Nothing I had told them was false. I had simply not told them the thing they cared about most. They wrote to the company, and the commercial director asked me to draft the reply. I have been answering letters of that kind, in one form or another, ever since.

I had studied geography and urban planning at the Université de Sorlanne and then management at Montchaval School of Management, finishing in 1998. Planning taught me to read a site plan. The business school taught me very little about selling something that would be delivered two years later; the pavilion did. By 2000 I was running it with four advisers, and I had begun turning up at handovers because I wanted to hear which of our sentences buyers repeated back to us.

In 2003 I moved to Paris as marketing manager for Ostrelle Immobilier, the residential development arm of a mutual banking group. There I learnt the discipline of the price grid: how a developer prices every lot in a building by floor, outlook, orientation and size, and how much of that arithmetic is really judgement. I built our grids from resale transactions rather than competitors' launch prices, and I learnt to defend them to sales directors who wanted every lot priced for a quick launch. By 2006 I was head of marketing for the Paris region.

In September 2008 I joined Hallevoort Projects, a listed Belgian developer, to build its residential marketing and sales in Brussels, Leuven, Ghent and Namur. A fortnight after I arrived, the banking crisis reached Belgium. For two years we sold apartments to people who did not know whether their bank would still lend to them, and I saw how quickly a pitch built on rising prices turns into a liability. I learnt to work in Dutch as well as French, under a Belgian law on homes sold before completion that differs from the French one in its protections and in its two-stage acceptance of the finished building, and I came to prefer explaining a buyer's protections to advertising around them.

I returned to Lyon in 2014 for family reasons and accepted a role that puzzled several people: director of customer relations and handover at Valcerne Habitat. In title it was a step sideways. In substance it put me in charge of the moment I had worried about since 1999. In my first full year we handed over about 2,300 homes with an average of twenty-three recorded defects each, and more than a third of those defects were still open six months later. I spent much of 2015 in stairwells with buyers and site managers. In 2016 I persuaded the company to postpone handovers when an inspection found too many defects, which cost money and an argument with our construction director that took a year to settle.

From 2017 I led marketing and sales strategy, and in January 2021 I became chief marketing and customer officer. The timing was unkind. Within two years the cost of a mortgage for our buyers had roughly quadrupled, the tax incentive for buy-to-let investors in new homes was being cut back towards its end in 2024, and individual buyers fell from 68% of our reservations to 38%. Much of what kept our sites moving was the sale of whole buildings to social landlords and institutional investors, which marketing supports but does not lead. The decisions that fell to me were narrower and more uncomfortable: whether to cut prices openly, what to say about the districts we were building, and which of our environmental claims we could defend.

On each of those I chose the option that cost more in the short term, and I lost some arguments on the way. I could not persuade our sales team to give up incentives entirely until 2024. I approved a brochure in 2019 that promised a tram I had no power to deliver, and I have told the residents of that district so in person. I also kept a café open for longer than the evidence justified because I liked what it said about the place.

I work by writing things down. Every claim in our sales material has an owner, a source and a date, and our legal director and sustainability director sign the claims that rest on their facts. I ask each member of my team to attend at least two handovers a year, and I still go to more than a dozen myself. Colleagues would probably say that I am slow to approve a campaign and quick to withdraw one, and that I care more about a buyer's letter two years after the sale than about the number of enquiries in a launch week.

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