You sell a service to apartment buildings in France: cleaning of common areas, lift maintenance, energy audits, supply contracts, small works. The person who signs is not an owner, it is the syndic, the professional managing agent that runs the building on behalf of the co-owners. So for your city or territory you need to know which firms actually hold management mandates, and how many buildings each one runs. The syndic databases on sale rarely say where they come from, and a map search for "syndic" returns agency storefronts, not the firms that hold the mandates.
The short answer. The most complete database of French syndics is public and free: the National Register of Co-ownership Buildings (Registre national d'immatriculation des copropriétés), kept by the housing agency Anah and republished every day on data.gouv.fr. Building by building, it gives the company name and SIRET number of the professional syndic. It carries no phone number and no email: the real cost of your database is what you add afterwards (contact details, verification, deduplication), not the list itself.
What the French condo register actually contains
Article L711-2 of the French Construction and Housing Code requires every association of co-owners to declare, among other things, the name of its syndic, and states that this information is made available to the public (Légifrance, art. L711-2 CCH, version in force since 11 April 2024). Anah publishes the result as open data under the French Open Licence 2.0, refreshed daily since April 2026 (data.gouv.fr, Registre national d'immatriculation des copropriétés).
We downloaded the file published on 28 September 2026 (a 409 MB CSV) and counted it line by line. It lists 652,758 co-ownership buildings, of which 327,622 declare a professional syndic. Behind those buildings sit 4,670 distinct syndic SIRETs, belonging to 4,444 companies (Anah, RNIC, file of 2026-09-28, outsend count).
For a supplier, the useful columns are:
- syndic type (professional, volunteer or not stated): the identity of volunteer syndics is not released as open data, so private individuals never end up in a business list;
- company name and SIRET of the legal representative, with its activity code and town;
- current mandate and end date of the last mandate: you know whether the syndic still runs the building;
- address, municipality code, number of units, construction period: enough to keep only the buildings your offer fits (an energy auditor does not target the same stock as a cleaning company).
This is what list sellers rarely put forward: the core data already exists, it is official and dated, and the licence allows commercial reuse.
Why a syndic listing built on activity codes falls short
The usual shortcut for a French syndic listing is to filter the Sirene business register on activity code 68.32A ("administration of buildings and other real estate"). We ran it on our local copy of Sirene (INSEE stock of 1 September 2026, updates applied through 26 September, Sirene database, INSEE via data.gouv.fr): 58,018 active, publicly listed establishments carry that code. Matched against the register, only 1,951 of them appear as the syndic of at least one registered building, or 3.4% (outsend count, 2026-09-28).
The filter also fails the other way. Of the 4,670 syndics in the register, 2,191 declare code 68.32A (46.9%), and 1,920 declare 68.31Z, the code for real estate agencies (41.1%). A list built on the activity code alone is padded with letting managers who run no co-ownership at all, and misses close to half of the real syndics.
Town by town: the syndic is often not where the buildings are
The second blind spot concerns searches by location. The register links each syndic to the buildings it manages, wherever its own office is. Here is what the file of 28 September 2026 shows for four cities:
| City | Registered buildings | with a professional syndic | Distinct syndics (SIRET) | registered outside the city |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rennes | 4,020 | 2,812 | 58 | 33 |
| Nantes | 6,324 | 4,257 | 82 | 33 |
| Grenoble | 3,879 | 2,547 | 64 | 29 |
| Le Mans | 1,250 | 775 | 36 | 27 |
Source: Anah, RNIC, data.gouv.fr file of 2026-09-28, outsend count. "Registered outside the city" means the town declared for the syndic's SIRET is not the town of the buildings: firms from neighbouring towns, head offices of national groups, managers based in a nearby larger city. In Le Mans, 27 of the 36 syndics present are in that situation. A search for "syndic Le Mans" on a map or in a directory will not tie them to the city.
Three ways to build the database, and what drives their real cost
The market offers three models, and none is free once you count the time.
- Buy a file. Billing is per row or by subscription to a searchable database. The upside is speed. The hidden cost comes down to three questions to ask the seller: where does the data come from, when was it collected, and does a syndic appear once or as many times as it has buildings? In the register, a list pulled building by building repeats each syndic 70 times on average (327,621 rows with a SIRET for 4,670 syndics).
- Search by hand in directories and on maps. Nothing to pay, but you only see agencies with a storefront in town, and the table above shows what that leaves out.
- Start from the register and enrich it. The list is free, complete for registered buildings, and every row carries its source and date. What remains is adding what the register does not publish: the website, the local office line, a verified business email. That is where enrichment tools earn their money, usually through credits spent per contact found; an invalid email or a duplicate burns a credit for nothing.
The practical workflow for a given area
This is the sequence we recommend, whatever tool you use for the enrichment steps.
- Download the day's file from data.gouv.fr and filter it on your municipality codes (column
commune, INSEE code) and ontype_syndic = professionnel. Add your own criteria: number of units, construction period, current mandate. - Deduplicate by SIRET. Keep, for each syndic, the number of buildings it manages in your area: that is your priority order, and a concrete opener for your first message, since you know which buildings it runs near you.
- Qualify the company. The SIRET allows an exact match with the legal registers: legal form, registered directors, any insolvency proceedings. In outsend you paste the deduplicated list and the company legal data module matches it by SIREN, with no fuzzy matching.
- Find the office that covers your area. For a group registered elsewhere, the right contact is the local office. A Google Maps extraction on "syndic de copropriété" in your area returns the addresses, phone numbers and websites of visible offices, to be matched to your list by name.
- Add a business email, then verify it before anything is sent. The email finder works from the office's website; the deliverability check removes addresses that would bounce.
The same logic works for other real estate professions: we applied it to independent real estate agents in a given area, using their own register. For the wider picture of French public company data, see our guide to open data sources.
Contacting French syndics within the rules
A professional syndic is a business, and your offer relates directly to its trade. The French data protection authority (CNIL) accepts that email prospecting of professionals can rest on legitimate interest, without prior consent, provided the message relates to the recipient's profession, the person was informed of the use of their address and can object; generic addresses such as contact@ belong to legal entities (CNIL, commercial prospecting by email).
On the phone side, since 11 August 2026 telephone canvassing of consumers is banned by default, except under an existing contract or with the person's prior consent: the rule no longer rests on registration with Bloctel, the former French do-not-call list (service-public.gouv.fr, updated 11 August 2026). Calling a firm's office line about building management remains a business-to-business approach. Either way, state the source of your data in your first message ("French national co-ownership register") and keep your own opt-out list: that is much easier to stand behind when the source is a public register.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free database of French syndics?
Yes. The National Register of Co-ownership Buildings, published by Anah on data.gouv.fr under the French Open Licence 2.0, lists for each registered building the company name and SIRET of its professional syndic. The file is republished every day.
Does the register give syndics' emails or phone numbers?
No. It identifies the company, not its contact channels. You need to add the website, the office line and a business address, then verify the address before using it.
Are volunteer syndics in the file?
The buildings managed by a volunteer syndic are in it (44,690 in the file of 28 September 2026), but the volunteer's identity is not released as open data. For a supplier, the sorting is already done: only professionals are named.
Why is my syndic listing based on code 68.32A so different?
Because that code covers every property administrator, including letting managers, and many syndics declare 68.31Z instead. In our cross-match of 28 September 2026, 3.4% of active 68.32A establishments appear as a syndic in the register, and 46.9% of the register's syndics declare that code.
Can I reuse this file for sales outreach?
The Open Licence 2.0 allows reuse, commercial reuse included, provided you credit the source and its date. Reusing the data does not exempt you from the prospecting rules: a message related to the syndic's trade, information on where the data came from, and a way to object.
Is every building in the register?
The register covers residential co-ownership buildings that have been registered. A building that was never registered does not appear, and the syndic type is blank for part of the records. For your area, count the rows with no syndic type before concluding that a sector is covered.
This article provides general information and does not constitute personalised legal advice. For specific situations, consult a lawyer specialising in property law or GDPR.
For the full picture, see our guide to compliant real estate prospecting in France.