French real estate: Fixed price agency saves €16,000

have stopped printing traditional brochures listing properties, although the wisest retain print advertising in local newspapers.

There has also been increased competition, with the emergence of different models of estate agents operating either in physical and online form, like Liberkeys, or using networks that operate only online with local representatives as freelancers or dealers.

"Favorable offer for buyers "

Liberkeys charges a flat fee of €6,500 when selling a property, up from €3,000 since launch, and requires exclusive authority, which has been achieved in 70% of cases. The company's managing director, Thomas Venturini, told The Connexion magazine that the company now sells''about five houses a day, and the average client saves €16,000 on commission. "It's very favorable for buyers, but not so favorable for agents, so we are looking at our prices and they could go up, perhaps to €10,000 in the future," he said.

Company expansion

The company was launched in 2018 and had sold 1,000 homes by the end of 2021. It has 120 employees, of which 75 are agents, and plans to double the amount of business it did in 2021 by the end of the year.The vibrant urban real estate market has led Liberkeys to place agencies in major cities including Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Paris, Reims and Rouen. The company will continue to expand using a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Crédit Mutuel''Arkéa, and aims to show a net profit by 2023.

Self-employed agents

Since 2019, the company has also expanded into rural areas, using mandated self-employed agents, who work mostly from home but have access to the same tools as full-time agents via computer. "What surprised me was how successful they became - in some months, 50 percent of sales were made in rural areas," Venturini said. Mandated agent networks without physical offices are a trend in the real estateagency market. They emerged in the early 2000s and promise commissions 10-15% lower than traditional agents.

Fears

Jean-Marc Torrolion, president of the agency trade association FNEM, believes that mandated agents and agents with''fixed-price has benefited from the growth of the real estate market, while traditional agencies have not necessarily sought to expand.