Set up in 2004, Expert Habitat & Industrie Groupe is headquartered in Arras, northern France. The company offers a full range of asbestos detection and management services, including engineering, assistance to owners and operators, asbestos identification, air sampling and analysis, and training. With revenue of close to €20 million, it is among the five market leaders in France.

Ever since its creation in 2004, the company has based its value added on a high level of technical expertise and a keen culture of innovation. It works mainly with clients in the public sector (social landlords) and industry and is made up of ive operating subsidiaries:

• Expert Habitat & Industrie Ingénierie and Servex Diagnostics: asbestos engineering and identification of materials containing asbestos,
• E2C: assistance to owners and operators (AOO) and asbestos & deconstruction project management
• Air Habitat Industrie: air sampling and analysis
• Sofortech: regulatory and technical training in building pollutants.

Expert Habitat & Industrie Groupe has 200 highly skilled employees who provide services across France from seven regional branches: Arras, the Paris region, Nancy, Annecy, Aix en Provence, Bordeaux and Tours.

As part of SOCOTEC’s Construction & Real Estate France Business Unit, the company is now headed by Emmanuel de Tinguy, who also manages the Group’s Real Estate Audits business line.

Expert Habitat & Industrie’s arrival in the Group brings SOCOTEC client segments that complement its own segments, with the same positioning of high technical content and quality of service. SOCOTEC will be able to use its two networks to combine their respective strengths and offer all clients the benefits of a greater production capacity, extensive support in asbestos management, and the advance that the SOCOTEC Group has gained in Building Information Modelling and service digitisation.

The network of services in real estate audits and asbestos at SOCOTEC now represents revenue of over €50 million and a 500-strong workforce, enabling SOCOTEC to aim at becoming industry leader in 2020.