Editorial standards

This document explains how La Reserve | Riviera produces, sources and verifies the information published on lareserve.co. We publish it openly because buying or selling property in France is a high-stakes financial decision, and you deserve to know the standard we hold ourselves to.

How we source market data

Every price-per-square-metre figure, every transaction-volume statistic, and every market-trend claim on this website comes from one of three primary references:

• DVF (Demandes de Valeurs Foncières) (data.gouv.fr). The French government’s open dataset of property sales recorded by notaires over the last five years. DGFiP publishes it twice a year, in April and October, and we refresh our local extract with each release.
• Notaires de France (notaires.fr/en). Official statistics from the French notarial profession, covering quarterly price indices and regional commentary.
• INSEE (insee.fr/en). France’s national statistics institute, used for demographic and economic context.

Where we have no primary source for a claim, we say so in the text. We write, for example, ‘based on the sales we handled ourselves this year’. We do not present anecdotal evidence as data. When an article quotes a private estimate, such as MeilleursAgents or Efficity, we name it and label it as an estimate.

Which sales our DVF figures cover

Our DVF medians, sale counts and price changes cover house sales of €1 million or more (€700,000 or more in Le Rouret, where €1M+ sales are too few): the houses our clients buy and sell. We keep houses of 100 m² or more sold as ordinary sales, and we count each sale once, even when the deed covers several lots. Every published median states its price floor on the page, and we never compare two villages on different floors without saying so.

Our figures cover houses sold for €1M or more. When a commune has fewer than 10 such sales in the latest complete year, its whole series switches to houses sold for €700,000 or more, and every figure says so. We never publish a median drawn from fewer than 5 sales: that year shows “too few sales” instead. A one-year change, or a change since 2021, appears only when both years compared have at least 10 sales each. If even the €700,000 floor leaves fewer than 10 sales, we publish the median of the last 5 complete years pooled together, and say so.

Our valuation tool works differently. It compares your home with house sales at every price, so that each house is measured against houses like it.

How we vet listings

Every property we present has been visited in person by one of our advisers. We confirm:

• The mandate is current and the seller has authority to sell
• The displayed price matches the mandate price
• The Carrez-law surface measurement is on file
• The energy performance diagnostic (DPE) is current and disclosed accurately
• The address, geography and identifying features in our photography match the actual property

We do not publish listings sourced from third-party scraped feeds without independent verification.

How we handle photography

All property photography is either produced by our team or licensed from professional photographers credited in the image metadata. We do not use stock imagery to illustrate specific properties. Where we use editorial imagery for town pages or articles, we credit the source and license commercially. Drone imagery follows DGAC regulations and respects private-property overflight rules.

How content is reviewed

Articles in our Guides section are written and reviewed by La Reserve Research, the editorial desk of La Reserve | Riviera. Each article carries:

• The byline La Reserve Research, with a clear separation between reporting and opinion
• A publication date and, where relevant, an update date
• Outbound citations to primary sources (DVF, notaires.fr, INSEE, service-public.fr) for every factual claim

Articles older than 12 months are reviewed annually for currency. Where a fact has become out of date, we update it and move the update date forward. We do not quietly delete the article or rewrite history.

How we handle conflicts of interest

We are a commercial real-estate agency. Where this might colour our analysis, we disclose openly:

• Articles featuring properties from our own portfolio are tagged accordingly
• We distinguish between observations supported by DVF data and our own commercial perspective
• We do not accept paid placement, sponsored articles or advertorial content
• We do not pay for inclusion in third-party publications

How we correct errors

If you spot a factual error on this site, write to contact@lareserve.co with the URL and a description of the issue. We aim to:

• Acknowledge the report within 48 hours
• Verify the claim against our sources
• Publish a correction within 7 working days where the report is upheld
• Note the correction transparently at the foot of the article (we do not silently edit)

Privacy and identifying information

We do not publish exact addresses, GPS coordinates or identifying photographs of currently listed properties. Sector-level location (e.g. “Peyniblou, Valbonne”) is the maximum granularity disclosed publicly. Exact location is shared only with qualified, verified buyers under a confidentiality undertaking.

Editorial governance

Editorial decisions are made by La Reserve Research. This document is reviewed every quarter. Material changes are recorded with a dated note. Write to the team at contact@lareserve.co.