The average price per m² in Houilles is 4 423 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 222 transactions are recorded each year.
Ambience illustration of Houilles, in the Yvelines.
The average price recorded in Houilles stands at 4 423 €/m². That average covers a split stock, since apartments account for 57 % of dwellings and houses for 42 % according to INSEE, the French national statistics institute. It blends the flats of the main boulevards and the surroundings of the station, the buildings that came out of the urban renewal schemes launched from 1955, and the detached housing of the Tonkin, Réveil-Matin and Printemps neighbourhoods, where houses with gardens dominate. Walking distance to the station remains the main factor of variation. These values come from the DVF database, which records the transactions actually registered before notaries.
Prices from the DVF file (Demandes de valeurs foncières, published by the DGFiP), transactions actually recorded at the notary at municipality level. Cross-referenced with the Notaires de France - INSEE indices. Learn more about our methodology.
The first driver of the Houilles market is the railway. Houilles-Carrières-sur-Seine station combines the RER A and Lines J and L of the Transilien, with more than 18 million passengers in 2024: few municipalities in the Yvelines offer such direct access to La Défense and Paris Saint-Lazare. That position supports continuous demand from households leaving Paris or the Hauts-de-Seine for a larger home without lengthening their daily journey. The closeness of Nanterre and Colombes, three and four kilometres away, places Houilles in the same employment area as the inner ring, at lower price levels.
The second factor is land constraint. Over 4,4 km² that are almost fully built up, building capacity rests on a few identified sectors: the surroundings of the station and the main boulevards, where the local planning scheme approved in June 2025 concentrates densification, for a target rate of around 170 new dwellings a year until 2040. Elsewhere, the rule protects the detached-housing streets and the gardens at the heart of the blocks. New building will therefore stay limited and localised, while the stock of houses, in the majority in the Tonkin and Réveil-Matin neighbourhoods, changes little from one year to the next.
Houilles sits clearly below its Hauts-de-Seine neighbours and below the established residential municipalities of the Yvelines, but above Argenteuil, on the other bank of the Seine.
The name of the municipality is recorded in 1205 in the forms Hullium and Holles, and its origin is still debated: the hypothesis most often put forward points to the Old French holle, the height. Traces of Merovingian occupation have been found in the Tonkin sector, and the church of Saint-Nicolas, whose oldest parts go back to the 12th century, marks the probable creation of the parish. In the 14th century, the town was surrounded by walls pierced by four fortified gates topped with turrets. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Houilles remained a farming village of the plain, away from the main routes, whose population barely exceeded 1 600 inhabitants in 1793.
The building of a wooden bridge at Bezons under the First Empire, then the arrival of the railway, tipped the village into the orbit of Paris. Houilles-Carrières-sur-Seine station opened in 1843 on the Paris to Rouen line, and the population began to grow through successive waves of housing plots. The political turning point came in 1904, when the town council passed from the farming families to the newcomers. Public facilities followed: the first sewers were built in 1886, the first school groups from the 1910s. Under the Third Republic, Houilles became a residential municipality of the inner suburbs.
During the Second World War, the Hispano-Suiza aeronautical plant set up on the territory was requisitioned by the German Kriegsmarine from 1940 to 1944. From 1955, urban renewal schemes brought the first multi-storey buildings into a town that had until then been almost entirely detached housing. From that period dates the coexistence, still legible today, between avenues built up with flats and streets of houses that take up most of the 4,4 km² of the municipality. The population went from around 1 600 inhabitants in 1793 to 33 983 in 2023. The municipality has also formed four twinning links: Friedrichsdorf in 1973, Chesham in 1986, Schoelcher in 1998 and Celorico de Basto in 2006.
Houilles has 33 983 inhabitants over 4,4 km². According to INSEE, the municipality counts around 15 700 dwellings, of which 93 % are main residences and only 1,6 % second homes: the market is residential, with no holiday dimension. Apartments account for 57 % of the stock and houses for 42 %, a balance that has become rare in the inner ring. Again according to INSEE, 62 % of households own their main residence and 36 % rent, which reflects a population settled for the long term. Buyers are mainly families and working households employed at La Défense or in western Paris, looking for a house with a garden a few minutes by train from the office.
The average price stands at 4 423 €/m², all property types together. That figure is calculated from the DVF database, which takes the transactions registered by notaries, and not from listings. It covers very different situations depending on whether the property is an apartment on a main boulevard or a house with a garden in the Tonkin or Réveil-Matin neighbourhoods, and on the walking distance to the station.
Houilles reads through detached-housing neighbourhoods rather than through a single centre. The Tonkin, the Réveil-Matin and the Printemps are made up mainly of houses with gardens. The town centre brings together the town hall, the market and the shops, while the main boulevards and the surroundings of the station concentrate the flats. The parc Charles-de-Gaulle is the main green space of the municipality. Price gaps play out above all between the flats of the avenues and the detached housing of the inner streets.
Houilles-Carrières-sur-Seine station combines three services: the RER A, which puts La Défense a few minutes away, and Lines J and L of the Transilien towards Paris Saint-Lazare. It recorded more than 18 million passengers in 2024, which makes it one of the busiest stations in the Yvelines. Since late 2025, an electric shuttle run by the conurbation links the Tonkin neighbourhood and the town hall to the station.
Unlike most inner-ring municipalities, supply is balanced: 57 % apartments and 42 % houses according to INSEE. Buying a house with a garden therefore remains possible, which explains the high share of owner-occupiers. The new local planning scheme does, however, limit the building footprint to 200 m² in the detached-housing sectors and imposes a 25 metre setback that protects the gardens at the heart of the blocks, which restricts plans to subdivide or extend.
The revised local planning scheme was approved by the town council on 10 June 2025, at the end of a procedure launched in November 2020. It raises protected green space to 102 hectares, around 2,7 times more than in the 2016 document, and extends the detached-housing zones by 55 hectares. Densification is concentrated on the main boulevards and the surroundings of the station. This is the document to consult before any building project.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).