The Collaborator Authorisation Certificate: Who Needs One and How to Get It

This is the blind spot of the Hoguet-law framework. An agency obtains its licence, recruits three negotiators, opens its doors — and nobody notices that the three negotiators are carrying out a reserved activity without being authorised to. The missing document is the attestation d’habilitation, the collaborator authorisation certificate, sometimes called a carte blanche in everyday speech. Here is what it is, and what it is not.

The principle: the licence does not cover the team

The estate agency licence is issued to the person — individual or company — carrying out the regulated activity. It does not automatically extend to the people who work for the holder.

Yet the activities covered by law no. 70-9 of 2 January 1970 are reserved. As soon as a collaborator takes part in brokerage or management — prospecting, showing properties, negotiating, having a mandate signed, managing a property — they are carrying out part of the regulated activity. They therefore need a title.

That title is the authorisation certificate, issued by the territorial chamber of commerce and industry at the request of the licence holder, not of the collaborator.

Who must hold one

The scope is broad and spans very different statuses:

• employed negotiators of the agency;
• self-employed commercial agents working on behalf of a licence holder;
• network mandataries attached to a head office that holds a licence;
• more generally, any individual taking part, on the holder’s behalf, in operations covered by the Hoguet law.

Two points matter.

Only an individual can hold a collaborator authorisation certificate. A company cannot be authorised as a collaborator: if it carries out the activity, it needs its own licence.

The certificate does not replace the licence when the collaborator goes independent. A mandatary who starts acting as an intermediary in their own name and for their own account leaves the authorisation regime and must apply for a licence, with everything that entails — professional aptitude, good repute, insurance, and a financial guarantee where relevant. The route is described in our article on obtaining the French estate agency licence.

How to apply

The application is made by the licence holder, on Cerfa form no. 15315, signed by the head of the business or the legal representative and sent to the competent CCI.

The certificate is personal and states the extent of the authorisation: which activities the collaborator may carry out, and in particular whether they may receive client money. That point deserves a conscious decision: authorising a negotiator to receive funds engages the agency’s financial guarantee.

Two administrative habits head off most trouble:

• apply for the certificate before the first client contact, not after the first signature;
• report the end of the collaboration to the CCI when a collaborator leaves, so the register reflects reality.

What is at stake if you skip it

A missing authorisation is not simply a paperwork lapse.

An unauthorised collaborator is carrying out a reserved activity: article 14 of the Hoguet law punishes habitually carrying out the covered operations without the required title with six months’ imprisonment and a €7,500 fine.

On the civil side the consequence is more immediate: the mandate obtained and the commission flowing from it are weakened, and an unhappy client has a serious argument for disputing payment. The licence holder, for their part, is exposed to the disciplinary consequences provided by the Hoguet framework and by the code of conduct set by decree no. 2015-1090 of 28 August 2015, which imposes in particular a duty to organise and manage the business properly.

Authorisation does not exempt from training

The certificate opens practice; it does not maintain it. Decree no. 2016-173 of 18 February 2016 subjects to the continuing-training duty both licence holders and their collaborators, employed or not, holding an authorisation certificate: 14 hours a year, or 42 hours over three consecutive years, including at least two hours on non-discrimination in access to housing and two hours on the other ethical rules since decree no. 2020-1259 of 14 October 2020.

A principal who is up to date on their own hours can therefore be in default because of their team. The detail is in our article on ALUR continuing training.

Why the law ties every participant to a responsible holder

The mechanism can look heavy. It answers a well-studied feature of property brokerage: where entry is loosely controlled and pay rests on a largely standardised commission, the number of participants rises without service quality following. Panle Jia Barwick and Parag Pathak, in “The Costs of Free Entry: An Empirical Study of Real Estate Agents in Greater Boston”, published in 2015 in the RAND Journal of Economics, document precisely that decline in average service quality as agents enter the market (see the study).

Personal authorisation is the French answer: every person dealing with a client is attached, by name, to an identifiable, insured and responsible licence holder.

Authorisation, employment contract and status: three separate questions

One persistent confusion deserves clearing up: the authorisation certificate is an administrative title to practise, not a status and not a contract.

It creates no relationship of subordination and reclassifies nothing: an authorised commercial agent remains self-employed, an employed negotiator remains an employee. Nor does it replace the mandate or contract organising the relationship between agency and collaborator, or the registration formalities attaching to the chosen status.

Three elements therefore coexist, and all three are needed: the contract or mandate defining the relationship, the collaborator’s legal status and its own formalities, and the authorisation certificate allowing them to operate within the Hoguet law’s reserved field. A well-kept file holds all three for each person.

Three things to check in your agency

1. An up-to-date named table: one row per collaborator, the certificate application date, the extent of the authorisation, and the end-of-collaboration date where relevant.
2. Consistency with mandates: the name appearing on a sale or management mandate must correspond to an authorised person. How activities are split between endorsements is explained in our article on the difference between the T, G and S licences.
3. A training counter per person, kept from the first day of collaboration rather than reconstructed as renewal approaches.

Take action

List everyone in your agency who speaks to a client about a property, then check that an authorisation certificate exists for each of them. Our full profile of the French estate agency licence sets out the regime for holders and for their collaborators.