You might imagine it’s a way of keeping everyone happy and giving your mates a little leg-up. But there’s a real financial logic to it.

To take part in some rankings, the ones where the manager is sure to get a place, you have to pay. Those are the rarest. Most of the time, the ranking is drawn up independently of the managers. They’re invited to the awards ceremony (or just receive a PDF), and that’s when they’re handed… a sales brochure for using the prize. The fee depends on the use and the ranking, but ranges between €2,000 and €7,000, according to documents I’ve seen. Several marketing managers told me they negotiate these rates, by up to -50%, so that nobody ever seems to pay the top of the range. It’s spending that gets particularly close scrutiny, since it’s the manager, not the SCPI (or the vehicle), that pays for marketing.

The fact remains that La Française, for example, paid for its SCPI Bureau - Écoresponsable [Office SCPI, eco-responsible] prize at the Tops d’Or so it could promote it actively, even though the valuations were bad, although the decision to cut the price was only taken in the summer of 2024.

Faced with the flood of prizes and the impossibility of working out what they’re worth, the AMF, France’s financial markets regulator, required a statement saying these badges were not reliable indicators. Yet out of the ten or so brochures and websites concerned, not one displayed it.

The other side effect is that managers who don’t play the game tend to disappear in the following years. Something observed for at least 4 SCPIs, 1 SCI and 2 retirement plans, whose situation had not, however, got any worse. A fact confirmed by one manager:

“We decided to stop paying... so we win fewer and fewer!”

And to conclude: “I don’t suppose that’ll surprise you”.
No, it doesn’t.

Especially since ranking bullshittery isn’t confined to financial products.