You search for the official CCI file of real estate professionals because a colleague told you the list of French real estate agents existed. It does: CCI France publishes the file of real estate professionals, and authorised self-employed agents are in it by name. Yet you query your town and do not find the agents whose signs you pass every day: a network agent is attached to his network's professional card, and therefore to the address of that network's head office. The obvious conclusion is that the file is badly kept. That is not the issue: it answers a different question from yours.
This page sets out the exact split between the French registers that lay claim to the word "list" in real estate, article by article, recounts what CCI France's public file really holds, then adds what it does not provide: a department-level order of magnitude, measured in-house and dated.
How to get the list of self-employed real estate agents in a French department
A national list by name does exist: CCI France publishes for download all the public data of its file of real estate professionals, and its "Collaborateur" sheet holds 92,188 commercial-agent certificates (count made on 5 October 2026 on CCI France's public file dated 3 October 2026). It cannot be filtered by place of work: the only address attached to a collaborator is that of the card holder. For one department, four sources each answer part of the question: the Sirene directory, which filters by department and by activity, the CCI France file, the special register of commercial agents kept at court registries, and the directories published by agent networks.
- The Sirene directory, NAF code 68.31Z. It is the official source that filters by the department of the declared establishment. It returns establishments (name, address, SIREN, SIRET, incorporation date), with no phone number or email, and the code mixes card-holding agencies with authorised independents. The French government's API Recherche d'entreprises, open to everyone, takes a filter on the company's NAF code, a filter on the department of its establishments and a filter limited to sole traders; it returns at most 25 results per page and leaves out companies that have opted out of publication. At outsend, the source that lists companies by activity queries that directory from a NAF code and a department and returns name, address, SIREN, SIRET, NAF code, headcount band, incorporation date and head-office flag.
- The CCI France file of real estate professionals. It lists holders of the professional card and, attached to each card, their authorised collaborators. The official page of the file (archived copy of 9 December 2024, in French) offers a search by name, trading name, region, town, SIREN number or professional card number, and a download of all the public data as one workbook. That workbook names each collaborator and his capacity, employee or commercial agent, with no address, no SIREN, no phone number and no email: it is located by the card holder's head office, not by the mandataire's patch.
- The special register of commercial agents. A non-salaried mandataire is entered there before starting to trade, at the registry of the commercial court where he is domiciled. It is kept registry by registry and it is not specific to real estate.
- Agent network directories. Networks publish a directory of their own advisers; the one run by iad, for instance, is searched by location or by name. A network directory stops at that network's advisers: it helps cross-check names on a patch, not cover a department.
In practice, a department file starts from Sirene, is checked against the CCI file, is cross-checked with network directories, and takes its field contact details from local business listings: the method is laid out at the end of this page. The sections below go through each register, give our count of the CCI France workbook dated 3 October 2026, then the number of 68.31Z establishments per department, measured on 6 September 2026.
Two statutes, two registers, and the whole misunderstanding
Article 3 of French law no. 70-9 of 2 January 1970 (version in force since 17 July 2025) reserves transaction and management activities to persons "holding a professional card, issued [...] by the president of the territorial chamber of commerce and industry". The same article closes with this sentence: "CCI France establishes and keeps up to date a file of the persons holding the professional card, according to procedures defined by decree." That is the file you were looking for. Its entry point is written into its own definition: card holders.
The self-employed agent, the mandataire, is not one of them. He falls under article 4 of the same law (version in force since 25 November 2018), which covers "any person authorised by a holder of the professional card to negotiate, act as intermediary or commit on that holder's behalf". Authorised by a holder, therefore not a holder. The word the trade uses daily, mandataire, appears nowhere in the statute: the legal term is "authorised person", and it describes a status derived from somebody else's.
That same article 4 sets out three prohibitions that qualify a list faster than any profile research. An authorised person may not receive or hold funds, may not draft private deeds other than mandates concluded for the benefit of the card holder, and may not "manage an establishment, a branch, an agency or an office". In other words, a branch manager is never an authorised mandataire, and neither is a contact who collects a deposit.
What the CCI file holds, field by field
The file is implemented by decree no. 2015-703 of 19 June 2015, in force since 1 July 2015, which entrusts it to CCI France. Its article 2 (version in force since 12 April 2019) lists what is recorded: the holder's identity, the card number and expiry date, the company's unique identification number, the trading name and sign, the addresses of secondary establishments, the receipt number of the prior activity declaration, the activities carried out, the financial guarantor, the professional account and the professional liability insurance.
Item e) of paragraph 3° of that article is what trips up a quick reading: the file also records the authorised persons and the managers of establishments, with their identity and their capacity. So the mandataire is indeed in there, by name. But the decree gives him no address, and the file attaches him to his card holder's professional card. You can read a holder's authorised collaborators, or go through all of them in the public workbook; you cannot ask the file for the mandataires working a given town, because the address it carries is the card holder's.
Article 5 of the same decree requires CCI France to run a public site giving access "freely and free of charge" to the data in the file, except for date and place of birth, nationality, and temporary or permanent bans on practising. That site exists, at professionnels-immobilier.cci.fr, and the official page cited above, in its archived copy of 9 December 2024, describes a search by name, trading name, region, town, SIREN number or card number. Article 6 states that the right to object does not apply "to the processing provided for in articles 1 and 6 of this decree", that is, to the file kept by CCI France: the decree gives a professional no right to object to being listed in it.
CCI France also publishes all the public data of the file as a single workbook, offered for download from the official page (archived copy of 9 December 2024, cited above). We downloaded and recounted it on 5 October 2026; the file served that day is dated 3 October 2026. It has ten sheets, including a "Collaborateur" sheet of 157,491 rows: 92,188 carry the capacity "Agent commercial" (commercial agent) and 65,303 the capacity "Salarié" (employee). Each row gives the capacity, birth name, name in use, first names and two flags, "Peut recevoir des fonds" (may receive funds) and "Peut recevoir l'engagement des parties" (may receive the parties' commitment). It gives no address, no SIREN, no phone number and no email.
A row is a collaborator certificate attached to a holder's card, and the only address the workbook lets you tie to it is that holder's. The 92,188 commercial-agent certificates are attached, with two exceptions, to 9,781 professional cards, and the ten holders carrying the most account for 43,295 of them, or 47.0%: I@D FRANCE alone carries 16,147, all attached to its head office in Seine-et-Marne. Ranked by the holder's department, Haute-Garonne (18,682 certificates, 20.3%) and Seine-et-Marne (17,002, 18.4%) together hold 38.7% of the country's commercial-agent certificates. That ranking describes where network head offices sit, not the areas where those agents work. Nor is a certificate a person currently trading: some rows show an expiry date already past on the date of the file. All these numbers are counts we made on 5 October 2026 on CCI France's public file dated 3 October 2026.
The workbook names natural persons. This page notes that CCI France publishes it for download; it takes no position on its conditions of reuse, which we found stated neither in the workbook nor in the archived copy of the official page. We use it here to verify and to count, not to build a contact file. For any contact, refer to the rules of the CNIL, the French data protection authority, on prospecting between professionals (in French): informing the person, including the source of the data when it was not collected from them (article 14 of the GDPR, French text), and the right to object (article 21 of the GDPR).
The register a self-employed agent is actually entered in
The second paragraph of article 4 of the 1970 law points explicitly to chapter IV of title III of book I of the commercial code, the chapter on commercial agents, "where they are not employees". That is the hinge: a non-salaried mandataire is a commercial agent, and he follows the formalities of commercial agents.
Article R. 134-6 of the commercial code (version in force since 1 January 2023) puts it plainly: "Commercial agents shall be registered, before beginning to carry out their activities, on a special register kept at the registry of the commercial court in whose district they are domiciled." The declaration now travels through the single-window IT service referred to in article R. 123-30-14, but the register itself stays at the court registry. In Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle it is kept by the registries of the judicial courts of Colmar, Metz, Mulhouse, Sarreguemines, Saverne, Strasbourg and Thionville.
Three practical consequences follow from that single sentence. The register is territorial, not national: there are as many special registers as there are competent registries. Registration follows domicile, not place of business: an agent domiciled in a neighbouring department can work your patch without ever appearing in your district's register. And registration precedes activity, which makes the register an indicator of entry into the trade, never of actual trading.
What Sirene measures, and what it does not
That leaves, among these official sources, the only one that locates the independent himself, by the department of his declared establishment: the Sirene business directory. It knows nothing of cards or authorisations; it knows a declared activity, NAF code 68.31Z (real estate agencies). It is a different angle, and when you start from an area rather than from a network, it is the one that answers.
Here is our measurement, taken on our local mirror of the directory, with INSEE flows applied through 6 September 2026, over active and publicly listed establishments. Code 68.31Z holds 121,509 establishments, of which 120,856 are attached to a French department. Active legal units under the code number 116,062, of which 56,242 are natural persons, or 48.5%: sole traders and micro-entrepreneurs. That number is lower than the 92,188 commercial-agent certificates in the CCI France workbook: the two sources do not count the same thing, and a natural person under 68.31Z remains an approximation of the self-employed agent, not a headcount. Measured on located establishments, 47.1% are held by a natural person.
The national figure says nothing about your area, and this is where the measurement earns its keep. The median department holds 683 establishments, the top ten departments concentrate 38.6% of the total, and Paris alone carries 9.1%. Above all, the share of natural persons, the closest proxy for the self-employed agent, varies by a factor of four: across the 93 departments with at least 200 establishments under the code, it runs from 17.1% in Paris to 73.2% in the Ardennes.
| Department | 68.31Z establishments | Held by a natural person | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paris (75) | 10,985 | 1,874 | 17.1% |
| Alpes-Maritimes (06) | 6,230 | 2,621 | 42.1% |
| Bouches-du-Rhone (13) | 4,599 | 1,888 | 41.1% |
| Rhone (69) | 3,674 | 1,719 | 46.8% |
| Herault (34) | 3,380 | 1,707 | 50.5% |
| Loire-Atlantique (44) | 2,839 | 1,552 | 54.7% |
| Yonne (89) | 498 | 347 | 69.7% |
| Ardennes (08) | 250 | 183 | 73.2% |
| Indre (36) | 224 | 156 | 69.6% |
How to read it: in Paris, a list drawn from code 68.31Z will overwhelmingly return companies. In a rural department, the same query returns overwhelmingly natural persons, the closest proxy for the population you call mandataires. The same filter does not produce the same file depending on where you point it, and that is measurable before you start.
Four gaps to know about before counting
The first gap is the publication scope. Our count keeps only active and publicly listed establishments: a legal unit that has requested non-publication of its data exists, trades, and stays absent from any list built on open data. No tool will find it, whichever one you use.
The second is the activity code itself. NAF describes the activity declared at registration. It is not a translation of a status under the 1970 law, and it is not updated when an agent changes network or moves into property management. Cross-checking legal form and named directors against the activity code corrects part of that blur, because the natural person versus legal entity distinction is structural.
The third is the gap between domicile and territory, already seen in the special register. It shows up in Sirene too: an establishment is located where it is declared, not where the mandates get signed.
The fourth is the simplest and the most often forgotten: an establishment is not a person. A card-holding agency can authorise ten salaried negotiators: none has a SIRET of his own, while each has his own row in the "Collaborateur" sheet of the CCI France workbook. Depending on whether you count structures or contacts, the same area does not give the same number.
Assembling your territory list without mixing the sources
The method that holds up stacks the sources in the order in which they answer, not in the order in which you discover them.
The base layer comes from Sirene: filter 68.31Z on your department or postcodes, then split legal entities from natural persons immediately. That split is not cosmetic; it decides everything downstream. Enrichment by SIREN and SIRET brings back legal form, incorporation date and declared address without retyping.
Verification comes from the CCI file: you check that a holder does have a valid card, and you read his authorised staff, on the site or in the public workbook. That file tells you which card a name is attached to; it does not tell you where that person works, which is why it comes second, after the department filter.
Field contact details come from local presence. A self-employed agent working a patch has a located business listing long before he has a website. That is where the phone number sits, along with the real trading address and often the trading name he introduces himself under, which is almost never his Sirene company name.
Once the list is built, the contact rules are those that apply to any business-to-business outreach in France since 11 August 2026: they are covered in the guide to the law of 11 August 2026, and the build logic is the same as for a list of property managers in a town, with a different split of registers. If you want to test this chain on your own department, create a free account.
For the cluster overview, see the guide to compliant real estate prospecting.
Frequently asked questions about French real estate registers
Where can the CCI file of real estate professionals be consulted?
Article 5 of decree no. 2015-703 requires CCI France to run a public site giving free and unrestricted access to the file's data. It sits at professionnels-immobilier.cci.fr; according to the archived copy of 9 December 2024 of the official page, it is searched by name, trading name, region, town, SIREN number or professional card number. CCI France also publishes all the public data as one downloadable workbook. Date and place of birth, nationality and bans on practising are excluded from public access.
Does a self-employed real estate agent hold a professional card?
No. Article 4 of law no. 70-9 of 2 January 1970 defines him as a person authorised by a card holder to negotiate, act as intermediary or commit on that holder's behalf. The card stays with the holder. The authorised person evidences his professional competence, his capacity and the extent of his powers, under conditions set by decree of the Conseil d'Etat.
Is there a national list of French self-employed real estate agents?
Yes, in a precise form. The public workbook of the file of real estate professionals, published by CCI France, contains a "Collaborateur" sheet of 157,491 rows, of which 92,188 are commercial-agent certificates (count of 5 October 2026 on the file dated 3 October 2026). Each row carries a name and a capacity, with no address and no SIREN, and is attached to a holder's card: the list is national, but it cannot be filtered by place of work. The special register of commercial agents, for its part, is kept registry by registry, under article R. 134-6 of the commercial code.
Which NAF code covers a self-employed real estate agent?
The code to query in Sirene is 68.31Z, real estate agencies. The code describes a declared activity, not a status under the 1970 law: it lumps together card-holding agencies and authorised independents. As of 6 September 2026 it holds 121,509 active and publicly listed establishments in the Sirene directory, 47.1% of them carried by a natural person (outsend measurement on our local mirror of the directory).
How do you verify that an agent is genuinely authorised?
You open, in the CCI file, the record of the card holder he is attached to, and read the authorised persons listed there: the 2015 decree records them with their identity and capacity. If the holder has no valid card, the authorisation derived from it is worth nothing, since article 4 makes it flow from the card.
Can a professional refuse to appear in the CCI file?
No, under the decree. Article 6 of decree no. 2015-703 expressly sets aside the right to object for this processing, that of the file kept by CCI France. Rights of access and rectification are exercised with the territorial or departmental chamber of commerce and industry concerned.
How many agents should you expect in an average department?
The median department holds 683 establishments under code 68.31Z as of 6 September 2026, but the share of natural persons varies fourfold by territory: 17.1% in Paris, 73.2% in the Ardennes, across the 93 departments with at least 200 establishments. A national order of magnitude is therefore no substitute for counting your own area.
This article provides general information and does not constitute personalised legal advice. For specific cases, consult a lawyer specialising in French real estate law or in data protection.