Sourcing Off-Market Property in France With Public Data (DVF, Cadastre, Open Data)

The Short Answer

French open data will not hand you an owner's name and phone number. What it gives you, for free and at market scale, is a signal layer: transaction prices and dates (DVF), the parcel map (cadastre), the companies that hold property (Sirene, trade register), and movement signals (Sitadel permits, BODACC notices). Cross those layers and you know which properties to watch and why. Owner identification is a separate, more constrained step. This is the English brief; the full playbook is in the French edition.

The Five Open-Data Layers

DVF lists five rolling years of transactions (type, surface, price, date, parcel) with no personal data, open since 2019 (data.gouv.fr). The cadastre plan is open, but owner identity in the MAJIC matrix is personal data and not open for individuals (CADA). Sirene and the trade register expose the SCI holding company and its manager. Sitadel publishes planning permits since 2013; BODACC publishes company events including insolvency proceedings, both via free APIs. Add the local PLU for buildability and ADEME energy ratings for distressed assets.

What It Will Not Do

No bulk owner contacts. GDPR applies regardless of the open licence (CNIL). And manual cross-referencing does not scale. That is where a system earns its cost: continuous ingestion, parcel-level joins, compliance logged. For developers the same layers surface underused buildable land before it becomes a competitive process. Want this signal layer built on your markets? Talk to us. It runs deployed on your own infrastructure.

Questions and answers

Does French open data reveal property owner names?

Not directly and not in bulk. The cadastre plan and DVF are open but carry no owner names: DVF has no personal data, and owner identity in the cadastral matrix is not open for individuals. A third party can request a per-parcel property record manually. For SCI holding companies, the entity is traceable via Sirene and the trade register.

What is DVF and what does it contain?

Demandes de Valeurs Foncières lists five rolling years of French real-estate transactions (open since 2019, excluding Alsace-Moselle and Mayotte): property type, surface, price, date, and parcel reference. No personal data, no named buyer or seller. It is the reference source for dating ownership, calibrating price, and spotting active zones.

Which public datasets support off-market sourcing in France?

Five core layers: DVF (prices and transactions), the cadastre plan (parcels), Sirene and the trade register (holding companies such as SCIs), Sitadel (building permits), and BODACC (transfers, deregistrations, insolvency), plus the PLU for buildability and ADEME energy ratings. Crossed together they form a signal system indicating which properties to watch. All are free and API-accessible.

Can this data be used freely for outreach?

The open licence allows reuse, but GDPR applies independently whenever personal data is involved. Public data is not free for commercial use without safeguards: the CNIL stresses that scraped online contact details remain personal data. Outreach must rest on a legal basis, informed postal mail with opt-out, or consent for electronic prospecting to individuals.

Sourcing Off-Market Property in France With Public Data (DVF, Cadastre, Open Data)