Is your French real estate agency website legally compliant? The Loi Hoguet mentions almost every site is missing

A few days ago I wrote about the six mentions an IPI-licensed Belgian agent's website is legally required to display, and I closed that piece with a paragraph I'd normally cut: “If you're a French agency instead, the rule is different — and I haven't gone deep enough into it to write a checklist as specific as the one above without risking getting a detail wrong.” I didn't want to fold two different legal frameworks into one shallow section just to make the article feel complete.

I went back and did the work properly. This is the French version.

The rule, in one sentence

If your agency operates under a carte professionnelle(the “carte T” — transaction), issued by your local Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie under the Loi Hoguet framework, that card number and a handful of related facts have to appear on every professional document your agency produces — mandates, invoices, business cards, and your website. Not once, buried in a “mentions légales” page nobody proofreads after launch — visibly, and specifically.

What has to be on the site

Based on the CCI's own published guidance on obtaining and using the carte T, here's what's required:

1. Your professional card number, in its actual format — something like CPI 1234 2018 000 012 345, where the digits encode the year the card was issued and a sequence number. Not a badge implying accreditation. The number itself.
2. The Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie that issued it— the specific CCI, not just “CCI” as a generic reference.
3. Whether your agency holds client funds — and the mention that applies either way. If your agency does nothandle funds, deposits, or securities on a client's behalf (common for smaller transaction-only agencies since a 2015 rule let them skip the financial guarantee with a signed declaration instead), you're required to state exactly that: that you cannot receive, hold, or handle funds in connection with the transactions you broker. If your agency doeshold funds, you're required to name the guarantee organization and the amount of the financial guarantee backing that instead. These are two different, mutually exclusive mentions — check which one actually applies to your agency before you write either.
4. Your professional civil liability insurer— the actual company name.

None of this is unusual as a compliance category — it's the same shape of requirement as the IPI mentions in Belgium: a license number, an issuing authority, an insurer, and a funds-handling disclosure. The French version just runs through the CCI and the Loi Hoguet (n°70-9 of January 2, 1970) instead of IPI's code of ethics.

The fee-display rule most agencies still get wrong

There's a second, separate obligation, and it's the one I'd bet is more commonly missed: since April 1, 2017, under the Arrêté du 10 janvier 2017 relatif à l'information des consommateurs par les professionnels intervenant dans une transaction immobilière, your agency's fees have to be displayed on your website — and reachable in two clicks maximumfrom the home page. A tab named something like “Nos honoraires” or “Nos tarifs,” linked from the main navigation, satisfies it. A fee schedule that only exists on a printed sheet in the agency's window, or buried four levels deep in a footer sitemap, doesn't.

The amount that has to be shown is the gross fee (commission), and the exact presentation rules differ depending on whether you're pricing a sale or a rental — I'm not going to improvise the line-by-line differences here, because I read this rule through search-result summaries and the arrêté's own title on Légifrance, not the full text of the arrêté itself (the live-fetch tool I'd normally use to read a source document in full was blocked for every domain I tried while researching this piece, including Légifrance directly — so I'm reporting what's consistently confirmed across sources, not paraphrasing a full legal text I could read end to end). If your fee structure is anything but a flat, simple percentage, that's a detail worth confirming with whoever handles your compliance, not with a blog post.

What I can say with confidence, because every source I found agrees on it independently: “two clicks maximum” is a specific, testable rule, and it's worth timing yourself against it right now.Open your own site from a fresh tab and count the clicks from your home page to a page that states your actual fees. If it's three or more, or if there's no such page at all, that's a real gap, not a judgment call.

The checklist for your own site

Five minutes, same discipline as the IPI check:

1. Open your footer, and any “Mentions légales” page it links to. Is your carte professionnelle numberwritten out in full — not just implied by a badge or a logo?
2. Is the issuing CCI named?
3. Does the site state, correctly for your agency's actual situation, either that you don't handle client funds or, if you do, who guarantees them and for how much? Check which one is true for you before checking which one is on the site — I've seen sites carry the wrong one after switching structures.
4. Is your professional liability insurer named?
5. From your home page, can you reach a page stating your actual fees in two clicks or fewer? Time it.

If any of these five is missing, that's not a design problem — it's copy that costs nothing to add once you know what belongs there.

What I'm not telling you

I'm not a lawyer, and nothing above is legal advice. The Loi Hoguet framework has exceptions for different legal structures (a société vs. an individual agent, a mandataireacting on another agency's card, and more), and a compliance professional reading your specific paperwork would catch distinctions I'm not qualified to make from a search engine. What I've given you is the practical version — the same structural check I'd run on any part of a site before touching a redesign, applied here to a page most agencies write once and never open again.

I also won't attach a specific penalty figure to a missing mention. Failing to display the required information can trigger disciplinary consequences through your professional body, and operating without a valid card at all carries penalties set out in the law itself — but I don't have a reliable, specific figure tied to this particular failure(an existing, valid card whose mentions are simply missing from the website) that I can stand behind, so unlike the CNIL fine figures I quoted in the cookie-banner piece, I'm not quoting one here.

Honest note on results:I have no data on what share of French agency sites are missing these mentions, and I'm not going to invent a percentage to make this land harder. What I have is the CCI's own published requirements for the carte professionnelle, a named arrêté with a specific, testable rule attached to it, and one direct reason to check: a Belgian counterpart of this exact article turned up a real, previously-documented gap on a real agency site. I have no equivalent finding on a named French agency to report here, and I'd rather say that plainly than manufacture one to match.

If you're a Belgian agency instead

I wrote the mirror image of this piece a few days ago: IPI-licensed agents in Belgium have their own set of six required website mentions, sourced directly from IPI, plus a 2026 sector-wide inspection campaign from Belgium's SPF Économie that names this exact gap as something being checked. Different country, different regulator, different list — worth reading on its own terms rather than assuming the two frameworks line up one-to-one, because they don't.

Where this fits if you're already planning a redesign

This sits outside my guide's eight chapters, same as the IPI piece — those chapters are built around conversion and identity, and legal mentions are neither. If you're rebuilding your site anyway, the cheapest place to fold this in is the brief itself: add “current carte professionnelle mentions, verified against your actual funds-handling status” and “fee page reachable in two clicks” as one-line acceptance criteria. It costs a developer nothing to get right the first time, and it's exactly the kind of item a generic web agency brief never thinks to include.

Hamza Benjaaba

Web designer and no-code developer, specialized in websites for real estate agencies and local service businesses. This piece is sourced from the CCI's own published guidance and Légifrance's own listing for the January 2017 arrêté, found through search rather than a full live read of the source documents — the tool I use to fetch a page in full was blocked on every domain I tried while researching this, Légifrance included. No French agency's site was audited for this particular piece, and I say so plainly rather than implying a check I didn't run.