How Brixfox Computes Its France Numbers

The catalogue: homes where we track Airbnbs, published region by region

The French catalogue is villas and apartments advertised on Bien'ici and Orpi (and, region by region, Le Figaro's two property sites) in the communes of the vacation regions we hold Airbnb calendar data for. A region is published only once its homes have passed our readiness checks: read on their own page, pinned, priced against comparable Airbnbs and photo-checked. Until then its homes are held back, and the region's live Airbnb data is shown on its own.

Life annuity sales (viager), bare-ownership sales, timeshare shares, units let to an operator under a commercial lease, tenanted units, commercial premises and mobile homes are refused at the door: each prints a price that is not the price of a home you could let short term. Large cities whose rules govern their own housing stock — Paris, Nice, Marseille, Bordeaux and others — and the Basque coast's compensation zone are out of scope on purpose.

Prices are euro asking prices, agency fee included (in France an advertised price includes the agency's fee by law). They are asking prices, not closed sales. A listing is retired only when its own page says it has gone, never because a search stopped showing it. The seller is credited by name wherever the listing names one — the agency, never the portal.

Nightly rate and occupancy: comps by distance, on each area's own season

The nightly rate and occupancy we project for a home come from the Airbnb listings we track around its coordinates — selected by real distance, never by commune name, and matched on the bedroom count the listing states. A home whose listing states no bedroom count is not priced. Occupancy is read from real availability calendars, tracked daily. Fewer than three comparable listings and we publish no revenue at all; fewer than 10 and the figure is marked indicative and never ranks.

Every French figure is on an annual basis: the occupancy we observe over a few months is turned into a year on the area's own seasonal curve (thirty-six months of monthly occupancy from AirROI, a third-party dataset, with the long-term trend removed), never multiplied up as if every month looked like the one we saw. A home whose comparables have no curve of their own is not priced on a national one. Annual occupancy is capped at 70%, which no French holiday market sustains over a year.

Hosts' calendars carry asking rates, not the price a night actually booked at, so the comp rate is corrected to a booked rate with a factor measured for France against a third-party benchmark at thirty-nine locations (1.09). Photographs move the BrixfoxScore, never the rate: no photo signal changes a French figure.

Our own night-by-night calendar history for France starts in summer 2026, so no French winter has been observed yet; every market page prints the completed months its figures cover.

The all-in cost: what a French purchase actually costs

Every yield is divided by the all-in acquisition cost, never the asking price alone, and the stored breakdown is printed line by line on each home's page:

• The droits de mutation (DMTO), per département. On an existing home, three lines: the département's rate — 4.50% in the Alpes-Maritimes, 5.00% in every other département we cover, the raised rate the law allows for deeds signed until 31 March 2028 — the communes' 1.20%, and the State's 2.37% frais d'assiette charged on the departmental part. Each rate is the DGFiP's own table; a home in a département that table does not give us is not priced, rather than charged a national guess.
• The agency fee and the duty base. The duties are charged on the full asking price, unless the listing shows the fee is charged to the buyer on top of the seller's net price, in which case they are charged on that net price only, as the law allows.
• A new build sold with VAT pays 0.70% land-registry tax plus 2.14% collection fees on the price excluding VAT instead, and no communal tax.
• The notary, on the regulated scale (3.87% to €6,500, 1.596% to €17,000, 1.064% to €60,000, 0.799% above), plus 20% VAT; the 0.10% land-registry contribution (€15 minimum); and €1,500 for disbursements, formalities and the power of attorney a buyer signing from abroad needs.
• Furnishing to the tourist-let standard: 3% of the price, between €8,000 and €25,000 for an apartment and between €20,000 and €60,000 for a house.

Net yield: fully managed, after income tax and social charges

The headline number is what a fully-managed, non-resident owner keeps. From the projected gross rent come the operating lines, each printed on the property page:

• A conciergerie at 20.3% of gross — the national average — plus 20% VAT the owner cannot reclaim (a furnished tourist let is VAT-exempt): 24.36% of gross.
• Booking-channel fees at 4% of gross, and cleaning and consumables at 5% of gross, net of what guests pay.
• Utilities: €2,000 a year for an apartment, €4,500 for a house. Insurance: €350 and €900.
• An apartment's copropriété charges: €40 per square metre, never less than €1,500 a year.
• A maintenance reserve of 0.5% of the price for an apartment, 0.75% for a house.
• LMNP accounting and the non-resident return, €600 a year.

The four local taxes, on one cadastral value

The taxe foncière, the waste-collection tax (TEOM), the taxe d'habitation on a second home (THRS, with the commune's surcharge where it votes one) and the business property tax (CFE) a furnished let owes are all a commune's rate on the same base: the home's cadastral rental value. That value is not published per home, so it is derived once, at €65 per square metre of floor area (1.1% of the price where the floor area is unknown), and all four taxes share it. The rates are each commune's own, from the DGFiP. The taxe foncière and the TEOM are charged on half that value; the THRS and the CFE on all of it. The CFE is never charged on less than the commune's minimum base for the home's receipts, and not at all on receipts of €5,000 or less.

On top of the rates the communes vote, the owner's bill carries the State's frais de gestion (collection fees, CGI art. 1641): 3% on the taxe foncière, the THRS and the CFE, and 8% on the TEOM. Each local-tax line includes them from model FR-2026.4.

The income tax

The buyer modelled is a non-resident individual letting furnished (LMNP), taxed on the régime réel — the regime the law now imposes on most unclassified tourist lets above €15,000 of receipts — on the net letting profit after depreciation, as nearly every LMNP owner files it. The allowance is the building, taken as 75% of the price (the land is not depreciable), over 30 years, plus the modelled furnishing over 7 years; it cannot create a loss, so the taxed profit never goes below zero. Two limits travel with it. It assumes the owner keeps LMNP réel accounts (the accountant is a cost line). And since loi n° 2025-127 art. 84 the depreciation deducted is added back to the taxable capital gain on resale, so it defers tax rather than removing it: the yield is higher, the exit pays part of it back. The land and furniture split is modelled, as no listing states it. Homes still on FR-2026.3 were taxed without depreciation until the rotation re-prices them. Income tax is at the non-resident minimum rate, 20% up to €29,579 of net income and 30% above, plus social charges of 18.6% — 7.5% for an owner affiliated to the social security of an EU or EEA state, Switzerland or the UK. On the régime réel each scenario is taxed on its own profit, and no tax is due on a loss.

The result, never below zero, is divided by the all-in cost. The self-managed figure beside it drops the conciergerie and the accounting and keeps everything else, the channel fees included.

French nets are thin, and this is why: Income tax and social charges on the letting profit, the local taxes (taxe foncière, TEOM, the second-home taxe d’habitation and the CFE) and a conciergerie charging 20% VAT on its fee all come off the rent before it reaches the owner. Capital appreciation is shown separately, at 2% a year, and the five-year return deducts the non-resident capital-gains tax (19% plus social charges) on a gain that includes the five years' deducted depreciation. Everything is before home-country tax and before financing; confirm the treatment with a French expert-comptable.

Ownership: freehold

French homes are bought in full ownership — land and building — so there is no lease term to discount. Bare-ownership, life-annuity and timeshare sales are refused, so every home in the catalogue is a full-ownership sale.

The energy rating (DPE): a flag, never a withheld yield

Each listing's DPE letter is the listing's own statement, not verified by us. Two rules of the law of 19 November 2024 attach to it, and the property page names the one that applies:

• F or G: Where the commune requires an authorisation to let a home as a meublé de tourisme, a home rated F or G cannot obtain a new authorisation until it is renovated to class A to E (law 2024-1039 of 19 November 2024).
• E: From 1 January 2034 every meublé de tourisme must be rated A to D (law 2024-1039 of 19 November 2024).

A rated home still shows its yield; a listing that states no letter reads “not stated”, never “fine”.

Registration: disclosed by the listing, never asserted by us

A second home let to tourists in France needs a change-of-use authorisation wherever the commune requires one, which a commune may make subject to compensation, quotas or a limit per owner (law of 19 November 2024). The rules are per commune: verify them with the mairie before buying.

A furnished tourist let is declared to the mairie and its listing must show its registration number. There is no public register to check a number against, so a home's position is whatever its own advertisement discloses, labelled as exactly that: a printed number reads “registration number disclosed”, unverified; a stated letting history with no number is the agency's statement; and a listing that says nothing reads “no registration stated”, an open question for the mairie rather than a red flag. Where a commune regulates tourist lets, its rules are shown as context, never as a verdict on the home.

Ask the mairie whether this commune requires a change-of-use authorisation and a registration number for a furnished tourist let, and whether either can be obtained for this property by a new owner. A number printed by the listing belongs to the current owner's declaration and does not transfer with the sale.

Location precision, stated honestly

Portals often blur the pins they publish. A home whose pin is only its commune's or its postcode's centre is not priced, because the comps around a town centre are not the comps around the home; a home pinned within a wider disc is priced at low confidence, and its page says so.

When we show no number

A projection with too little behind it is worse than none. With fewer than three comparable listings, no stated bedroom count, a centre-of-town pin or a département we cannot price, the home publishes no revenue and no yield. Where the implied gross yield on the all-in cost is above 20% — the point at which the likelier explanation is a price that is not a whole home's, such as a life-annuity down payment, rather than an exceptional home — the figures are withheld and the listing is marked under review. A home whose own listing says it needs full renovation is shown on its net after the estimated works, labelled an estimate, and only when that net is at least 2%. A market-level figure is only printed once a region has published homes to compute it from.