You search for the official CCI file of real estate professionals because a colleague told you the list of French real estate agents existed. You land on the right site, you query your town, and you barely recognise anyone: the self-employed agents whose signs you pass every day have no record of their own. The obvious conclusion is that the file is badly kept. It is kept perfectly. It simply answers a different question from yours.
This page sets out the exact split between the two French registers that both lay claim to the word "list" in real estate, article by article, then adds what neither of them provides: a department-level order of magnitude, measured in-house and dated.
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 scope 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. But he is in there as an attribute of a card holder's record, not as a record of his own. The key by which the file is queried remains the professional card. You can open a holder's record and read his authorised colleagues; you cannot ask the file for the mandataires of a given town, because that is not a search axis, it is a column inside a record.
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 it is searched by name, trading name, town, SIREN number or card number. One detail matters when you are building a list: article 6 states that the right to object does not apply to this processing. A professional cannot ask to be removed while he is still practising.
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, and no counter publishes the total. 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 the one base that accepts being queried by area: 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 for building a territory list it is the only 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, the usual status of a self-employed agent. 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, therefore card holders and their teams. In a rural department, the same query returns overwhelmingly natural persons, therefore 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 negotiators, none of whom has a SIRET or a record of their own. Depending on whether you count structures or contacts, the same area doubles.
Assembling your territory list without mixing the sources
The method that holds up stacks the three 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, one record at a time: you check that a holder does have a valid card, and you read his authorised staff. It is a unit-by-unit checking tool, never a bulk extraction tool, and the decree asks nothing else of it.
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, alpha access is requested directly.
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 and is searched by name, trading name, town, SIREN number or professional card number. 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?
There is none. A non-salaried agent is entered on the special register of commercial agents, kept at the registry of the commercial court where he is domiciled, under article R. 134-6 of the commercial code. There are therefore as many registers as competent registries, and no published national aggregate. The totals in circulation come from adding up network self-declarations, not from a register.
Which NAF code covers a self-employed real estate agent?
68.31Z, real estate agencies, in the vast majority of cases. 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?
Not while practising. Article 6 of decree no. 2015-703 expressly sets aside the right to object for this processing. 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 independents 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.