Interview with Fabien Weill, Head of Acquisitions at CDC Habitat

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), it’s possible to understand everything about a given property market and to quantify the trends in real-time. It also enables decision-makers to rationalise their options and makes it easier to manage investment strategies. A practical example of this is CDC Habitat, which regularly turns to Homiwoo for a detailed assessment of its plans for property sales and acquisitions. 

A subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, CDC Habitat's mission is to manage public property assets. The organisation looks after more than 530,000 homes in metropolitan France and overseas, some of which it owns and others it manages on behalf of institutional investors, both French and foreign. Today, it faces a key challenge: an expected increase in the years ahead of constraining factors involving the energy consumption of buildings. One of the organisation’s solutions to this challenge is to acquire housing stock that has high levels of energy efficiency, a move reflected in its purchase of a large number of new-build properties. 

“One of our main challenges is to continue to meet the very high demand for housing in France," says Fabien Weill, Group Acquisitions Director, CDC Habitat. “We are currently a long way from the 600,000 homes that need to be built every year in our country.” As a social landlord that has to address all the needs of French people, CDC Habitat is involved with a wide variety of housing – lower rent, intermediate, flexible lease and managed accommodation (such as residences for seniors or students) – along with nursing homes, co-living units and other facilities.

Volume, immediacy and reliability of data 

In total, the organisation buys an average of about 10,000 homes each year, a significant volume that brings equally sizeable challenges. "With the purchasing activity being so intense, you need to have fully mobilised teams and very detailed market research," explains Fabien Weill. And this is where Homiwoo comes in… "One of the great advantages of their AI solution is the immediacy of the result: a few clicks are enough to know a potential market price, whereas it would take several days for a market study ordered from a more traditional partner. When we’re responding to enquiries about large portfolios within very tight deadlines, this immediacy is very valuable and potentially decisive.” Another advantage of AI is that it can determine the ability of households to pay a given rent and calculate the true market price for a given transaction. This figure can then be used to challenge the estimates made by independent research firms also commissioned by CDC Habitat. "It means we can make comparisons, dig deeper, and demonstrate an alternative estimate - so that we end up with the best possible purchase price," says the Director of Acquisitions.

The daily challenges faced by CDC Habitat became particularly intense in 2020. "That was when our role as a public interest body took on its full meaning. As a partner for national and local property developers, we were asked to actively support the market and property development.” CDC Habitat responded by calling for 40,000 new homes to be built in mainland France and its overseas territories in a period of six months. Used to working with about 20 developers, the company then had to work with around 100 and to change its pre-purchasing processes. “We no longer relied solely on traditional market studies which, if they’re going to be reliable, take some time to produce,” Fabien Weill emphasises. “We used the type of solutions offered by Homiwoo to get instant results, which meant we were able to buy four times more properties in six months than we normally do in a year.”

More broadly, CDC Habitat regularly calls on Homiwoo when contacted about the potential acquisition of large portfolios within short deadlines, or when housing is being sold, either by individual units or when grouped together. "The great strength of Homiwoo is that it can draw on multiple sources to calculate people’s ability to pay a given rent or to work out a market price. And because we carry out back-testing of the figures provided by Homiwoo, we know that their data is reliable.” By helping to set the right price for housing, the company has become a key partner for achieving CDC Habitat's objectives.