The average price per m² in Mauguio is 4 816 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 230 transactions are recorded each year.
Atmospheric illustration of Mauguio and Carnon, in the Hérault department.
The average price recorded for an apartment in Mauguio stands at 4 816 €/m². That average covers two very different markets brought together in a single municipality. On one side the historic village, some ten kilometres from the sea, organised around its castle mound and the housing estates that surround it. On the other Carnon, a seaside resort built on the coastal strip in the 1970s, where seafront homes facing the marina and the beaches dominate. The latter pull the municipal average upwards. The figure comes from the DVF database, that is to say 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 first driver of the market is the twofold nature of the municipality. The village of Mauguio lives on the proximity of Montpellier, some twelve kilometres away, and on the employment concentrated within its own territory around Montpellier-Méditerranée airport and the Fréjorgues business areas. Carnon depends on another cycle, that of the tourist season and of second-home demand on the Languedoc coast. The population, at 16 522 inhabitants, is slightly down on 2017: the municipality is no longer gaining permanent residents, which is partly explained by the place of homes occupied only part of the year.
Land is the second constraint. On a territory of 49,56 km² largely taken up by the Étang de l'Or, by farmland irrigated since the 1950s and by flood-prone areas, buildable surfaces are limited, and the coastal strip of Carnon has been built up since the schemes of the 1970s. The Pays de l'Or authority, which brings together eight municipalities and is based in Mauguio, has carried planning at that scale since it became an inter-municipal authority on 1 January 2012. That scarcity of land supports values, in Carnon even more than in the village.
Mauguio trades above Montpellier, its immediate neighbour, but stays behind La Grande-Motte, a resort born on its own land. The gap with inland towns, such as Nîmes, is markedly wider.
Mauguio was called Melgueil, a name recorded from 996. The municipality was the capital of a powerful county, whose territory covered most of the present-day Gard and the east of the Hérault. Around the middle of the tenth century, the counts claimed the right to mint coins: the melgorian denier, an alloy of copper and silver, circulated throughout Languedoc and long served as a regional monetary reference. One of them, Pons de Melgueil, became abbot of Cluny from 1109 to 1126. In April 1215, in the context of the Albigensian crusade, the pope placed the county under the suzerainty of the bishop of Maguelone, Guillaume d'Autignac.
From that period the castle mound survives, a feudal mound around which the village and then the farmed countryside gathered. It is the largest in the south of France preserved in its original state and is listed as a historic monument. The name Mauguio took hold in notarial deeds from the middle of the sixteenth century and became common in the seventeenth. The municipality long remained agricultural, turned towards mixed farming and vines, on a plain bordered by the Étang de l'Or. The coast, for its part, was then occupied only by fishermen's huts built near the lagoons.
The twentieth century changed the picture. In 1936, the Air Ministry had land studied on the edge of the lagoon; the first aircraft landed at Fréjorgues in 1938 and the first civil terminal was inaugurated in 1946. The airfield took the name Montpellier-Méditerranée airport by an order of 1 February 1994. From the 1950s and 1960s, irrigation allowed fruit growing to develop. In 1974, La Grande-Motte, created on land taken from Mauguio, became a municipality in its own right. Carnon, laid out in the same decade on a grid street plan with its marina, fixed the seaside vocation of the coastal frontage.
Mauguio is not a main-residence municipality like any other. According to INSEE, the French statistics institute, it has 13 080 dwellings, of which 63,0 % are main residences, 31,0 % second or occasional homes and 6,0 % vacant: close to one dwelling in three is not occupied year-round, and that share is concentrated in Carnon. Again according to INSEE, apartments account for 57,0 % of the stock and houses 42,8 %, and 60,8 % of households occupying their main residence own it. Buyers therefore split between families of the Montpellier area looking for a house in the village, and second-home buyers drawn by the seafront.
The average price of an apartment stands at 4 816 €/m² in Mauguio. That figure is calculated from the transactions actually registered with notaries and published in the DVF database, not from listings. It is a municipal average that mixes the village of Mauguio and the resort of Carnon: depending on the area, the view, the floor level or proximity to the beach, the value of a property may depart clearly from it.
Yes, they are two distinct markets within a single municipality. Mauguio, some ten kilometres from the sea, is a village organised around its castle mound, surrounded by housing estates and farmland: people buy there above all to live year-round. Carnon, on the coastal strip separating the Étang de l'Or from the Mediterranean, is a 1970s resort where homes close to the marina or the beach trade at another level.
Mauguio lies around 12 kilometres from Montpellier by road. On public transport, bus route 607 reaches the Boirargues stop on tram line 3. For Carnon, the service runs on route 4 of the Pays de l'Or network, which links the resort to the Pérols Étang de l'Or terminus of that same line 3. A beach shuttle operates in summer between that terminus and the Grand Travers area.
The municipality is covered by a flood risk prevention plan approved by a prefectural order of 16 March 2001, which includes flooding from the sea and from the lagoons. The local planning scheme translates that zoning into red and blue flood-prone sectors and into coastal sectors. A revision of the plan, begun after the weather events of 2014, was submitted to public inquiry from 24 September to 25 October 2024. Check the applicable zoning before any project.
The two markets coexist. According to INSEE, houses account for 42,8 % of the municipal stock: they are essentially in Mauguio itself, in the estates surrounding the village, with a limited supply and slow turnover. Apartments, in the majority, are concentrated in Carnon and in the more recent schemes. The price shown on this page relates to apartments; a house with land trades on other references, specific to its area.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).