Renovating a condominium, hassle on all floors

When Esther, owner of an apartment in Seine-Saint-Denis, discovered that her co-ownership trustee was planning to do a facelift without adding any energy renovation work, she rebelled and came up against a wall.

Her meetings with members of the union council only aroused hostility, her e-mails, she says, "fell into a hole"...

With her personal and professional life which does not allow her to get involved as she would like in the file, she regrets having "always a delay" on the decisions of the syndic.

"I could be my super activist, go get everyone's contact details and go annoy the whole world, but I don't have time," she confides, discouraged.

Olivier (first name changed at his request), a Parisian executive in the ecological transition, found himself in the same situation, of a union council which approves work without energy renovation, as is however mandatory since 2015.

"I came across a trustee + old school +, three years from retirement, who was in mode + it's not how we do it and anyway it won't work +", he tells the AFP.

He managed to stop the project, in his eyes a "climate negligence", by attacking the decision in court.

"It was a personal choice that I made, to incur legal fees for my beliefs," he says. "I have this luxury. I am a senior executive, not an energy-poor household". "If people like me don't, who will?"

Years of procedure

Their case is symptomatic of the pitfalls for successful energy renovation in condominiums, which represent 28% of buildings in France.

The difficulty comes first of all from the very form of the co-ownerships, where the decisions, which are taken by voting in the union council, can be long and tedious to adopt, especially when they involve large sums.

"Between the moment we enter into a relationship with a condominium and the moment when the works are voted on, it takes four or five years on average", testifies Christophe Dujardin, president of the regional agency Ile-de-France Energies.

Difficult to get everyone to agree with owners who have projects, also explains Sébastien Catté-Wagner, expert in condominiums at the National Housing Agency (Anah). "You have co-owners who intend to sell, lessors-investors who do not want to do work, young people in debt for whom it is not easy to pay 15.000 euros..."

To which is added the lack of readability of the various aids.

Constraints and incentives

To accelerate the energy renovation of buildings, a major pillar of the ecological transition, the State has indeed multiplied the measures.

The owners of dwellings are obliged to carry out an energy performance diagnosis (DPE) if they wish to put them up for sale or for rent.

And for the most energy-intensive (labeled F and G), it is already forbidden, since August 24, to increase rents. From 2023, outright bans on renting will gradually hit thermal sieves.

On the incentive side, Anah's flagship system, launched in July 2021, is called MaPrimeRénov' Copropriétés. It can subsidize 25% of the amount of the work, provided that the energy performance gains are substantial (35% at least).

Some 12.000 homes benefited from the scheme in 2021 at a cost of around 70 million euros.

The regional energy agencies also offer loans and play a role of "integrator", that is to say of overall pilot of the sites.

"It's being discussed more and more and you're going to see a lot of new services and players. I think the big energy companies are thinking about it," explains Carine Sebi, professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, to AFP.

"This subject of energy renovation does not come out of environmental awareness. It comes only because we are forced, either because our housing is becoming unsanitary or because our energy bill is going to explode," she adds. . “We need to grasp the current crisis linked to inflation to promote the energy savings generated by sobriety but above all energy efficiency”.