France (FR) — civil law.
Nothing on this page describes United States or Argentine practice.
La publicité foncière
Ownership and encumbrances are recorded at the service de la publicité foncière (SPF), a DGFiP service — except in Alsace-Moselle, where the
livre foncier does the job under judicial control
(alsace-moselle).
The per-property extract is the demande de renseignements, which returns
the current owner and the registered charges (hypothèques, privilèges,
servitudes).
needs_verification, and each of these decides whether an automated workflow is
possible at all:
- the current form references and the fee per request;
- whether a non-resident foreign natural person may file directly, or must go
through a
notaire; - turnaround;
- whether any bulk or subscription access exists for a legitimate professional user, or whether it is strictly per-folio.
Do not assume "open data country" means open ownership
France’s cadastral geometry and its transaction prices are genuinely open. Ownership is not. The two facts sit close together and get merged. A workflow that plans to enrich thousands of parcels with owner names from open French data is planning on something that does not exist.
The cadastre gives you the parcel and its geometry. DVF gives you what it
last sold for. The SPF gives you who owns it — one property at a time, for a
fee, and possibly only through a public officer.