Training French Property Professionals: What a Provider Must Plan For

The market is steady, recurring and driven by law: roughly every three years, every French estate agency licence holder and every authorised collaborator must evidence 42 hours of training. For a training provider, that is structural demand. It still takes an offering that satisfies both decree no. 2016-173 and the funding rules. Here are the points to settle.

Understand precisely which duty you are answering

The ALUR law of 24 March 2014 and decree no. 2016-173 of 18 February 2016 require professionals covered by the Hoguet law to complete 14 hours of training a year, or 42 hours over three consecutive years of practice. The duty came into force on 1 April 2016.

Three elements shape the design of an offering.

The audience is wider than it looks. The duty covers licence holders and their collaborators, employed or not, who hold an authorisation certificate. A ten-person agency therefore represents ten separate counters, not one. The authorisation regime is detailed in our article on the collaborator authorisation certificate.

The content must be occupational. Training covers the skills needed to practise: legal, technical, commercial, ethical. The field is broad, but not unlimited — a personal-development module unconnected to the trade does not answer the decree’s purpose.

Four hours are earmarked. Since decree no. 2020-1259 of 14 October 2020, the 42 hours include at least two hours on non-discrimination in access to housing and at least two hours on the other ethical rules.

The non-discrimination module: build it seriously

This is the most scrutinised module and often the worst handled. Reducing it to a recital of criminal-code provisions misses its point.

The material exists, and it is measured. Mathieu Bunel, Samuel Gorohouna, Yannick L’Horty, Pascale Petit and Catherine Ris, in “Ethnic Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market: An Experiment in New Caledonia”, published in 2019 in the International Regional Science Review, run a correspondence test on the rental market and document differences in treatment by applicant origin (see the study).

A useful session builds on that kind of evidence: present the testing method, show where the gaps actually sit — file screening, responses to viewing requests, the wording of listings — then work on the agency’s own practices rather than on the penalties alone. That is what separates useful training from a two-hour formality.

Evidence and traceability: the real operational requirement

The professional taking your hours will have to evidence them to the chamber of commerce and industry, in a renewal file lodged within the two months preceding expiry of their licence, on Cerfa form no. 15312. Your certificate is the document that counts.

Design it accordingly:

• named, in the individual trainee’s name, not the agency’s;
• stating the duration in hours and the dates clearly;
• specifying the title and content of the training, so the link to occupational skills is legible;
• isolating the ethics and non-discrimination hours, so the professional can also demonstrate the four earmarked hours.

A certificate reading “property training — 14 h” with no detail forces your client to evidence the rest some other way. A well-built certificate is a commercial argument.

Funding: where Qualiopi comes in

The ALUR rules do not themselves require the provider to be certified for the hours to count. But the funding question arises immediately, and it changes the answer.

As soon as a provider wants its courses covered by public or pooled funds, Qualiopi certification is required — the access condition in force in France since 1 January 2022. In a market made up of very small firms, self-employed workers and commercial agents, that question is not secondary: it often decides the purchase.

A provider targeting this market therefore has two parallel workstreams: the instructional design specific to the ALUR duty, and compliance with the French national quality framework. The administrative prerequisites for certification — starting with the activity declaration number (numéro de déclaration d’activité) — are covered in our overview of French professional certifications and approvals.

Mind how you word it: Qualiopi certification attests to the quality of the training provider’s processes. It does not “validate” ALUR hours, and it is not a property-sector label. Communications suggesting otherwise expose the provider to challenge.

Build a catalogue that follows the three-year cycle

Because the duty is triennial, an ALUR catalogue works as a pathway, not as a standalone course.

One workable split:

Block	Indicative volume	Content
Ethics core	4 h	Non-discrimination in access to housing (2 h) and other ethical rules (2 h)
Legal update	7 h a year	Legislative and case-law developments affecting transactions, management or co-ownership
Occupational specialisation	variable	Co-ownership, letting management, taxation, planning, commercial leases, anti-money-laundering

This split is not imposed by the texts: it is a way of structuring an offering so the client reaches a coherent 42 hours across the cycle, with the four earmarked hours secured in year one.

Two segments deserve distinct formats. Licence holders want dense legal updates in short sessions. Negotiators and mandataries, often self-employed and commission-paid, weigh the time cost: distance formats and split sessions are decisive for them.

Sell a need, not an obligation

The last point is commercial. Selling “the mandatory 14 hours” puts the offering on price-competition ground. Selling a legal update that prevents a defective mandate, or a non-discrimination module that genuinely equips file-screening practices, puts it on value ground.

French property professionals work in a dense legal environment — the Hoguet law, the code of conduct set by decree no. 2015-1090 of 28 August 2015, anti-money-laundering duties. The training need is real before it is regulatory.

Take action

Map the two segments first — licence holders and authorised collaborators — then build your four-hour ethics and non-discrimination core before anything else: it is the block nobody can skip. Our full profile of the French estate agency licence gives you your future clients’ regulatory frame, and our article on ALUR continuing training sets out the duty as the agency sees it.