Secrets.RealEstate's Real Estate Score rates any French address on a 30–100 scale from 15 metrics — a single number that is convenient and dangerous at once. Here is what feeds a location score and where you should still trust your own eyes: a look inside our own machine, limits included.
What does a location score actually compress? In the Real Estate Score, fifteen metrics — noise, air quality, sunlight, transit and schools, crime figures, flood and industrial risk among them — feed four weighted categories: Lifestyle Premium (~33%), Living Quality (~29%), Investment Fundamentals (~18%) and Risk Factors (~15%). The score is computed from official French records rather than reputation: past sale prices are public through DVF, environmental and natural-risk exposure through GeoRisques, and noise and air-quality maps exist for most urban areas. The scoring is rule-based rather than LLM-generated, so the same coordinates always produce the same numbers. And two design choices matter more than the weights: every address starts at 30 points, because no location is worth zero, and results are rounded to the nearest 5, because false precision is its own kind of lie.
What a good score captures well is the structural, slow-moving truth of a place. A flight path does not move. A ring road does not get quieter. A north-facing valley does not gain winter sun. These are precisely the things a single viewing on a bright Tuesday afternoon will hide from you, and precisely the things you cannot renovate your way out of after you have signed. The scale of such fixed risks is measurable: in Secrets.RealEstate's analysis of France's national building database (BDNB), 53.9% of the 32 million mapped buildings stand in a medium or high clay-shrinkage risk zone — a slow structural hazard no sunny viewing reveals.
What no score can capture is the texture of a street: the neighbours, the morning light on the kitchen, the bakery that makes a block feel alive, the building works planned but not yet visible. Use the number to rule places out quickly and to ask sharper questions — never to skip the walk-around.
The right workflow is simple. Let the score filter your shortlist and flag the risks worth investigating. Then visit, at different times of day, and check the official records yourself. The score tells you where to look harder; it was never meant to make the decision for you.
