The average price per m² in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre is 5 935 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 181 transactions are recorded each year.
Mood illustration of Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, between the hospital and the porte d'Italie.
The average price recorded in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre stands at 5 935 €/m². That average covers a stock made up almost entirely of flats: according to INSEE, the French national statistics institute, 94,7 % of dwellings are apartments, on a territory of 1,54 km², one of the smallest in the Val-de-Marne. The gaps come mainly from the period of construction and from the location, between the tenement buildings of the early 20th century close to the Paris boundary, the residences of the 1960s and 1970s and the more recent schemes. The weight of the social housing stock also bears on the make-up of sales. 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 local market is the scarcity of land. On 1,54 km² that are entirely built up, with a density close to 15 700 inhabitants per square kilometre, the municipality has no free ground left: supply rests almost solely on the resale of a stock of flats put up in the 20th century. The volume is narrow, of the order of one hundred and eighty apartment sales a year, which makes annual averages sensitive to the mix of properties sold. The weight of social housing, around three thousand six hundred social rented dwellings according to INSEE, further reduces the share of the stock likely to change hands.
The second driver is the improvement of transport. The opening of the Hôpital Bicêtre station on Line 14, on 24 June 2024, placed the municipality about twelve minutes from Orly and on a direct axis towards the north of the metropolis; expected ridership is of the order of twenty thousand passengers a day. To this is added a permanent hub of jobs and study: the Bicêtre hospital, which has around two thousand beds, and the faculty of medicine of the université Paris-Saclay sustain constant rental demand, notably on small units.
Le Kremlin-Bicêtre sits in the upper middle of the southern inner ring, above Villejuif and Ivry-sur-Seine, its two direct neighbours. The gap with Paris remains very marked, even though the municipality borders the capital.
The name of the municipality comes from two origins unconnected with each other. Bicêtre comes from a manor house built in the 13th century by John of Pontoise, bishop of Winchester: the Petit Winchester became Bicestre by distortion, then Bissêtre, an old word that meant misfortune. Le Kremlin comes from the sign of a tavern, Au Sergent du Kremlin, run by a veteran of the Russian campaign of 1812; the place name appears on maps as early as 1832 and ended up designating the whole district. This territory therefore has neither an old village nor a medieval church at its origin: it took shape along the road to Fontainebleau, around a hospital establishment.
That establishment dominates local history. In 1632, Louis XIII ordered the demolition of the ruins of the château de Bicêtre and the building of a hospital intended for wounded soldiers. The edict of 1656 creating the Hôpital général turned it into a vast depot, by turns an almshouse for the elderly, a state prison and an asylum, until the reforms carried out at the end of the 18th century by Philippe Pinel and Jean-Baptiste Pussin. In the 1840s, the building of the Thiers wall added the fort de Bicêtre on the heights. The rest of the land remained farmland and came under Gentilly: the Kremlin district only really became urban from the Second Empire onwards.
The separation from Gentilly was settled in December 1896 and the municipality of Le Kremlin-Bicêtre became official on 28 April 1897, with Eugène Thomas as its first mayor. The town was then built in a few decades on a tiny territory, first with tenement buildings and then with blocks of flats. The hospital modernised: a paediatric wing in 1952, the first French paediatric cardiology department in 1957, attachment in 1962 to the fourth hospital group of the Assistance publique. The faculty of medicine, created by decree in 1968, moved in 1980 into buildings raised on the grounds of the hospital. The metro arrived on 10 December 1982, the station then being the terminus of the southern branch of Line 7.
Le Kremlin-Bicêtre has 24 110 inhabitants over 1,54 km², a density close to 15 700 inhabitants per square kilometre. According to INSEE, the municipality has around 13 400 dwellings, of which 94,7 % are apartments, and 89,5 % of them are main residences: the town is lived in year-round, second homes are marginal there. Renting dominates by a wide margin, with 67 % tenants against 29,7 % owner-occupiers, a proportion explained by the weight of the social housing stock and by the student and hospital population. Buyers are above all young working households looking for an address one stop from Paris, and local tenants who become owners on the spot.
The average price per square metre in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre stands at 5 935 €/m², all apartment types together. That figure is calculated from the DVF database, which records the sales actually registered before notaries, and not from listings. It is a municipal average: a studio in a residence of the 1970s and a renovated three-room flat close to the metro depart from it markedly. An online valuation places your property more precisely.
With 1,54 km², the municipality reads as a few blocks rather than as extended districts. The north, against the porte d'Italie and the ring road, continues the Paris fabric of the 13th arrondissement. The centre, around the town hall and the avenue de Fontainebleau, concentrates the shops and the station on Line 7. The south-west is taken up by the grounds of the Bicêtre hospital and the faculty of medicine, which leave little room for housing.
The Le Kremlin-Bicêtre station, on Line 7 of the metro, opened on 10 December 1982 and serves the centre of Paris without a change. Since 24 June 2024, the Hôpital Bicêtre station has linked the municipality to the automatic Line 14, which reaches Orly airport in about twelve minutes and Saint-Denis Pleyel to the north. The ring road and the porte d'Italie are on the municipal boundary, and several bus routes complete the network.
Rarely. According to INSEE, houses account for around 4,4 % of the dwellings of the municipality, that is a few hundred properties, mostly small town houses set into the older fabric. They rarely change hands and trade above the municipal average. A buyer looking for a detached house with a garden will find more supply in Villejuif or in L'Haÿ-les-Roses, where the detached-housing fabric has remained more present.
As the stock is almost entirely in co-ownership, the collective documents should be gathered early: minutes of general meetings, statement of service charges, works voted on the facades or the lifts. The energy performance diagnosis also weighs, since a large share of the buildings predate the first thermal regulations. Finally, the closeness of the ring road and of the main routes creates differences in noise nuisance from one street to another, which buyers note during viewings.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).