The average price per m² in La Plagne Tarentaise is 5 498 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 239 transactions are recorded each year.
Atmospheric illustration of La Plagne Tarentaise, in the upper Tarentaise valley in Savoie.
The average price recorded in La Plagne Tarentaise stands at 5 498 €/m². This average covers a municipality of 96 km² born in 2016 from the merger of four villages, whose territory is tiered from 600 to more than 2 700 metres of altitude. It brings together two very different markets: the resort apartments, which make up most of the sales on the piste fronts of Plagne Centre, Belle Plagne, Montchavin or Les Coches, and the houses of the valley-floor villages and of the sunny slope, at Bellentre, La Côte-d'Aime or Valezan. The figures come from the DVF database (the French record of notarised property sales), which lists the transactions actually registered with 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 local market depends first on visitor numbers. With close to 9 900 second homes for 3 836 permanent residents according to INSEE, it is not the municipality's population that sets prices, but demand for holiday housing. The link to Les Arcs through the Vanoise Express in 2003 changed the scale of the ski area, Paradiski reaching around 425 kilometres of pistes, which supported the value of homes near the lifts. The summer season, hiking and cycling, has grown but remains secondary in rental income.
The second driver is the condition of the building stock. A large share of the apartments dates from the construction waves of the 1960s to the 1990s, from Plagne Centre in 1961 to Plagne Soleil in 1990, and is reaching an age where energy retrofit and the upgrading of developments count in negotiations. Buildable land is scarce in a mountain zone, which limits new supply and shifts transactions towards older property. The question of housing seasonal and permanent workers, for its part, remains a recurring subject of municipal debate.
A mountain municipality whose stock is overwhelmingly holiday housing, La Plagne Tarentaise sits below the most established Haute-Savoie resorts such as Les Gets or Le Grand-Bornand. The gap is wide, on the other hand, with a lowland town such as Chambéry.
Before skiing, the upper Tarentaise lived off mountain farming, forestry and orchards. The baroque heritage of the villages keeps the trace of it: the church of Saint-Nicolas in Mâcot, the church of Saint-André in Bellentre, and in Valezan a church dedicated to Saint Francis de Sales, built between 1727 and 1730. Mâcot also had a resource rare in the valley, a silver-bearing lead mine worked until its closure in 1973. On the other slope, La Côte-d'Aime and Valezan, perched at around 1 000 to 1 200 metres on the south-facing side known as the sunny slope, remained farming villages, hit like the whole valley by the rural exodus of the 20th century.
The turning point came in 1959, when Doctor Pierre Borrione, mayor of Aime, set about creating a winter sports resort to slow that depopulation. Aime, Bellentre, Mâcot and Longefoy joined together in the intermunicipal syndicate of La Grande Plagne. The first resort, the future Plagne Centre, opened on 22 December 1961 with two lifts and four pistes, on a plan by the architect Michel Bezançon organised around a piste front set above the forest, level with the mountain pastures. The satellites followed over some thirty years: Aime 2000 in 1968-1969, Plagne Villages in 1971, Montchavin in 1972, Belle Plagne in 1981, Plagne 1800 in 1982, Plagne Soleil in 1990.
The 1992 Albertville Olympic Games gave the municipality its bobsleigh and luge track, the only facility of its kind in France. In 2003, the Vanoise Express cable car linked Les Coches to Peisey-Vallandry and formed, with Les Arcs, the Paradiski area, some 425 kilometres of marked pistes. On 1 January 2016, Bellentre, La Côte-d'Aime, Mâcot-la-Plagne and Valezan merged to create the new municipality of La Plagne Tarentaise, classified as a tourist resort by decree of 15 December 2017. Hence the present shape of the territory: permanent villages on the valley floor and on the sunny slope, and eight piste fronts built at altitude between 1 250 and 2 100 metres.
According to INSEE (France's national statistics institute), La Plagne Tarentaise has 3 836 inhabitants for 11 764 dwellings, of which only 1 755 are main residences: second homes and occasional dwellings account for close to 84 % of the stock. Apartments make up about 82 % of dwellings, a direct consequence of the building of the resorts. Buyers are therefore mostly holiday owners, French families and a Northern European clientele, often letting in season. Among main residences, 69 % of households are owner-occupiers according to INSEE: this core of permanent residents, working in the lifts, accommodation and services, mainly buys houses and older homes in the villages.
The average price recorded is 5 498 €/m², calculated from transactions registered by notaries and published in the DVF database. It is a municipal average, bringing together a piste-front studio as well as a village house at Bellentre or Valezan. Altitude, ski-in ski-out access, aspect and the build date of the development create noticeable gaps from one area to another.
The municipality brings together two sets. At altitude, eight of the eleven piste fronts of La Plagne, among them Plagne Centre, opened in 1961, Belle Plagne, Plagne 1800, Plagne Villages, Plagne Soleil, along with Montchavin and Les Coches on the Bellentre side. Lower down, the permanent villages of Mâcot and Bellentre on the valley floor, and on the sunny slope La Côte-d'Aime and Valezan, which have stayed farming and residential.
Both markets coexist but do not have the same volume. According to INSEE, apartments account for about 82 % of the municipality's dwellings. The supply of houses is therefore narrow and concentrated in the valley-floor villages and on the sunny slope, with longer search times and fewer price references. Resort apartments are more liquid, but their value depends heavily on access to the slopes.
Rail access is through Aime-La Plagne station, on the Tarentaise line that climbs to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, then by shuttle or mountain road to the high-altitude resorts. The national road 90 serves the valley from Albertville and Moûtiers. A property close to a free shuttle stop gains in value, as car access to the piste fronts is constrained on changeover Saturdays.
The territory falls under the loi Montagne (France's mountain-planning law), which governs the extension of development, and under natural risk prevention plans covering avalanches, torrential floods and ground movement: consulting them is a prerequisite. In resort developments, the co-ownership charges, the schedule of renovation works and, where applicable, the commercial lease tying the home to an operator must also be examined.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).