The average price per m² in Ventabren is 4 589 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 17 transactions are recorded each year.
Atmospheric illustration of a hilltop village in Provence.
The average price in Ventabren stands at 4 589 €/m², based on DVF transactions actually registered with notaries (DVF is the French record of notarised property sales). The figure applies to a very particular market: 92 % of the municipality's stock consists of detached houses, often on large plots, and apartments account for only 8 % of dwellings. Apartment sales there are therefore few.
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.
After 3 392 €/m² in 2021, the average price in Ventabren reaches 4 589 €/m² in 2026, an increase of roughly +35 % over the period.
The Ventabren market is that of a comfortable residential municipality of the Pays d'Aix, where the dominant product is a house on a large plot. That structure has a direct bearing on how prices should be read: the apartment average, calculated on about fifteen sales a year, describes a marginal segment of the stock. The price of houses, nearly 20 % higher, is more representative of the real market.
The constraint ahead is regulatory as much as land-related. The classification of 1 327 hectares as exceptional or very high fire hazard, part of it in the urban zone, weighs on the scope for densification and imposes vegetation clearing obligations on owners. The vacancy rate of 10,7 %, high for a municipality at this price level, is worth watching: in a stock mostly thirty to fifty years old, it probably signals properties that call for renovation.
Placed back in its setting, Ventabren sits below Aix-en-Provence but clearly above the towns of the Étang de Berre and above Marseille.
The village grew from a Roman villa, Ventabrenum, and the hermitage of Saint-Honorat is attested there in 963. The seigneury appears in the records in 1170, with a twelfth-century royal castle whose ruins still dominate the old village. The passage of Queen Joanna in 1348 attached her name to those remains, still known as the castle of Queen Joanna.
The most spectacular structure in the municipality came later: from 1841 to 1847 the engineer Jean-François Mayor de Montricher had the Roquefavour aqueduct built to bring water from the Durance to Marseille by the Marseille canal. With its three levels of arcades, its eighty arches, nearly four hundred metres in length and more than eighty metres in height, it remains the tallest stone aqueduct in the world. It was listed as a historic monument in 2005.
The territory was crossed a second time by a major piece of infrastructure at the end of the twentieth century, with the viaduct of the Mediterranean high-speed line. The perched old village, its narrow lanes, its small squares and its fountains, contrasts with the residential districts developed below from the 1970s.
Ventabren is a residential municipality in the ring around Aix-Marseille: 86 % main residences, fewer than 3 % second homes, a population up by nearly 7 % since 2017. Buyers are households working in Aix-en-Provence, fourteen kilometres away, or in Marseille, thirty. They look for detached houses with land, by far the dominant product, with an average of 4,9 rooms per dwelling and more than 80 % owner-occupiers. The apartment market, very much a minority, is concentrated in the old village and its surroundings.
The average apartment price is 4 589 €/m² and that of houses 5 467 €/m², based on DVF transactions actually completed before notaries. The apartment market stays narrow, about fifteen sales a year: the figure is an order of magnitude rather than a strict reference.
Because Ventabren was built up as scattered detached housing on large plots, mainly between 1971 and 1990. Houses account for 92 % of the stock. Flats are essentially limited to the perched old village, whose older buildings are constrained.
The margin is small. A forest fire risk prevention plan was ordered on 25 March 2021 and extended on 27 October 2023: 1 327 hectares of the municipality are classified as exceptional or very high hazard, of which 47 hectares lie in the urban zone of the planning document. Vegetation clearing obligations apply in the wooded massifs and within a two-hundred-metre strip.
Mainly by road, Aix-en-Provence being fourteen kilometres away and Marseille-Provence airport seventeen. There is no station in the municipality: the Aix-en-Provence high-speed station is seventeen kilometres away. A bus route links Ventabren to Aix. That dependence on the car is part of the local market.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).