The average price per m² in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage is 8 804 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 241 transactions are recorded each year.
Mood illustration of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, between the beach, the pine forest and the seaside villas.
In Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, the average price stands at 8 804 €/m². That average covers a very particular stock: according to INSEE, the French national statistics institute, close to eight dwellings in ten are second homes and apartments account for around two thirds of the stock. The gaps are marked between the seafront blocks, the town-centre apartments close to the rue Saint-Jean and the villas of the Forêt district, built on large wooded plots. This figure comes from DVF data, that is the transactions actually registered by notaries, and not from listings or statements of intent.
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 permanent population is falling: 4 588 inhabitants in 2012, 4 224 in 2023 according to INSEE. That decline does not point to a flat market, but to a stock turned more and more towards second-home use, with close to eight dwellings in ten occupied for part of the year only. Demand comes largely from outside the municipality, carried by the rail link from Paris-Nord and by the A16. The average household size, 1,67 people, also reflects the weight of retired couples and of small dwellings in the stock occupied year-round.
Tourist activity remains the main driver: the resort can take up to 250 000 visitors in summer, and its calendar of events, among them the Enduropale run on the beach since 1975, keeps up its profile out of season. The historic facilities, a golf course opened in 1904, a racecourse and an airport dating from 1936, support that footfall. On the supply side, land is constrained by the forest, the dunes and the Coastal Act: new-build schemes remain limited and go through regulated operations such as the ZAC Quentovic. That structural scarcity explains part of the gap with the rest of the coast.
Le Touquet-Paris-Plage sits well above the price level of the neighbouring municipalities of the Côte d'Opale and the baie de Somme. The comparison marks the gap between a holiday resort and port towns whose market rests on main residences.
Before 1882, the site was only a belt of dunes attached to the territory of Cucq. Alphonse Daloz, the owner of the estate, had pines planted there from 1855 to fix the sands: that is the origin of the forest which still structures the municipality. In 1882, Hippolyte de Villemessant, director of the Figaro, gave the place the name Paris-Plage, which announced its calling as a holiday resort for the capital. The surveyor Raymond Lens then laid out the first parcelling, between the sea and the boulevard Daloz, on a tight grid. That orthogonal pattern of the seafront can still be read in the town plan and explains the built density of the sector closest to the beach.
From 1902, the British businessman John Whitley and his company, the Touquet Syndicate, launched the parcelling of the forest zone, drawn by the surveyor Joseph-Louis Sanguet. The plots grow larger as one moves away from the sea, which explains the present contrast between a dense town centre and a Forêt district made of large villas on wooded ground. The golf course opened in 1904 and British visitors flocked in. On 28 March 1912, the resort became an independent municipality under the name of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, detached from Cucq. The Anglo-Norman architecture of that period remains very present: twenty-one buildings are protected as historic monuments. The airport was built in 1936.
From 1940 to 1944, the German occupation turned the resort into a fortified position of the Atlantic Wall. Villas on the seafront were demolished to clear the views over the beach, the Atlantic hotel was destroyed in 1943 and the bombing of June 1944 caused heavy damage. During mine clearance, more than 106 000 mines were lifted from the municipal territory, which makes Le Touquet-Paris-Plage the most heavily mined municipality in France. The two small lighthouses of 1845 and 1851, destroyed on 2 September 1944, were replaced by the present lighthouse of 57 metres, inaugurated in 1952. Post-war reconstruction explains the presence, between the older villas, of more recent blocks along the seafront.
Le Touquet-Paris-Plage has 4 224 permanent inhabitants. According to INSEE, the municipality counts around 12 700 dwellings, of which 79,7 % are second homes and only 19,3 % main residences: year-round residents are a small minority of the stock. Apartments account for 65,7 % of dwellings, houses for 32,9 %. Among main residences, 63,1 % are occupied by their owner and the average household size is 1,67 people, the sign of a fabric of small households and retired people. Buyers are therefore in large majority second-home purchasers, along with households settling at the time of retirement.
The average price recorded in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage is 8 804 €/m². It is calculated from DVF data, which records the sales actually registered by notaries. It is a municipal average: an older apartment in the second row and a villa of the Forêt district do not sit at the same level. To approach the value of a specific property, the online valuation takes account of its address, its floor area and its condition.
Since 2011, the municipality has distinguished four districts: the Centre-ville, the Forêt, Canche-aéroport and Quentovic. The Centre-ville, inherited from the parcelling of 1882, is dense and close to the shops of the rue Saint-Jean and to the beach. The Forêt, parcelled out from 1902, brings together the large villas on wooded plots. Canche-aéroport and Quentovic, further back, are of recent formation and concentrate most of the new-build operations.
The nearest station is Étaples-Le Touquet, a few kilometres from the centre, linked to Paris-Nord in about 2 h 25. By car, the A16 motorway serves the municipality at junction 26, opened on 15 May 1998, which brought the resort markedly closer to Lille and to the Paris region. The Touquet airport, built in 1936, today handles mainly business and leisure aviation. That accessibility bears directly on second-home demand.
The two markets sit side by side without overlapping. According to INSEE, 65,7 % of dwellings are apartments, concentrated in the town centre and along the seafront, where supply is most plentiful and floor areas often modest. Houses, 32,9 % of the stock, correspond largely to the villas of the Forêt district, on vast wooded plots, with volumes and budgets clearly higher. The municipal average blends these two realities.
Le Touquet-Paris-Plage is a coastal municipality: building there is framed by the Coastal Act, which strongly limits development in the areas close to the shore and the dunes. To that are added heritage protections, with twenty-one buildings listed or registered as historic monuments, which govern work on the older fabric. Buildable land is therefore scarce and new-build operations go through planned schemes, such as the ZAC Quentovic launched in 2019 with 222 dwellings.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).