Leboncoin wins a lawsuit against the real estate listings app Jinka

The real estate listings app Jinka was ordered on Tuesday, April 14, by the Versailles Court of Appeal to pay 200.000 euros to the Leboncoin platform for using its listings without authorization, following a similar ruling against SeLoger, and denounces a "legislative obsolescence".

Who owns the rental listings published on the platforms, the platforms themselves or the real estate agencies? This is the question that the courts answered, having been approached separately by SeLoger and Leboncoin.

The two companies accused Jinka of using the listings they hosted without their permission. For its part, the free app, which its founder Marc Lebel described to AFP as a "Google for real estate," maintains that the listings belong to the agencies that publish them.

In both the initial and appeal decisions - in December 2025 for SeLoger, also before the Versailles Court of Appeal - the court held that the platforms were databases, within the meaning of the intellectual property code, protected by copyright, which Jinka infringed.

The application was ordered on appeal to pay 60.000 euros in damages to SeLoger.

Jinka is expected to appeal Tuesday's decision, according to its founder.

"While Leboncoin refuses access to its data for Jinka, it simultaneously opens its entire catalogue to Google and signs a strategic agreement with OpenAI to integrate its catalogue into ChatGPT," Jinka notes in a press release.

"The situation is alarming: global technology giants benefit from unlimited access to French real estate data, while FrenchTech is hampered," the company laments.

She deplores a "legislative obsolescence" of the regulations on databases, stemming from a 1996 European directive.

The start-up believes that database law "lacks clarity in the digital age, and even more so in the face of the rise of artificial intelligence".

Marc Lebel regrets that the two platforms consider Jinka, which brought them traffic until it removed their ads, "as a competitor".

"Today, there's a housing crisis, so there are a lot of scams," he notes. His business, he says, relies on algorithms that identify duplicate and fake listings.

Jinka, created in 2020, claims four million users and listings "from more than 5.000 real estate sites", including Gens de confiance, LocService or Maisons & appartements.

When contacted by AFP, Leboncoin did not immediately respond.