French Riviera · France
The oldest luxury coast in the world and still the one with the widest price range: from a village house in the hills to a cape estate that trades once a generation and never in public. The Riviera is where the blind listing was invented.
The Ranesta Index
Editorial estimate of prime asking bands, September 2026. Not a valuation. Typical entry €5.0 m, trophy from €100 m. Prime marketing time about 300 days.
Where exactly
The short version
The Riviera is not one market. The capes, Ferrat and Antibes, are a closed club of estates that trade by introduction between families who have known each other for two generations; a listing there is a sign that something has gone wrong. Saint-Tropez is a summer economy where the house is priced by the rent it can earn in July. The hills above Cannes and Nice are a normal prime market with agents, portals and comparables.
What the three share is the French system, which is slower, more expensive to hold and more predictable than the Spanish one. The notary is neutral, the deposit period gives the buyer ten days to walk away, and the wealth tax on real estate is the number that decides how long people keep their houses.
The trophy assets are the water frontages on the capes, and they are as scarce as anything in the world. The desk has watched three sales on Cap Ferrat in two years and none of them had a brochure.
Worth knowing
Who is buying
Everybody, which is the point. Old European money on the capes, Gulf and Russian-diaspora money in the domaines, Americans in Saint-Tropez, and the Scandinavians and Swiss in the hills. The French themselves buy in Mougins and Valbonne.
What the desk is working on
Any waterfront on the two capes, domaines in Ramatuelle with a letting record, and belle-époque houses above Cannes that need work. The desk holds a blind instruction on Cap Ferrat that will not be described further on this page.
Buying notes
The compromis de vente is binding after a ten-day cooling-off period for the buyer; the deposit is five to ten per cent. Costs are around eight per cent all in. Buy through an SCI if the house will pass to children, and have the IFI modelled before the offer, because for a fifteen-million house it is a six-figure annual number.
In the private portfolio
Blind listing
RN-0409 · Côte d'Azur
Waterfront on Cap Ferrat
A belle-époque estate on the water with a pool at the sea, held by one family for two generations.
7 bedrooms900 m²6,000 m² plot
€60 m to 80 mReference RN-0409
RN-0425 · Côte d'Azur
Domaine behind Saint-Tropez
Three hectares of vines and pines in Ramatuelle with a bastide and a summer letting record.
8 bedrooms700 m²30,000 m² plot
€22 m to 26 mReference RN-0425
Open buyer mandates
The hotspot vote
Questions buyers ask
On a fifteen-million house with no debt, roughly 150,000 a year, every year. Debt secured on the house reduces the base, which is why most estates on the coast carry a mortgage the owner does not need.
Yes. A serious buyer registers with two or three people and waits. Estates surface when a family changes generation, and the first call goes to buyers who are known to be ready. That is the whole mechanism.
Saint-Tropez if the house should earn in the summer and be full of people; the capes if it should be quiet and hold value for thirty years. They attract different buyers and the prices behave differently.
Three to four months from the offer to the keys, driven by the notary's searches and the pre-emption rights of the commune. Faster is possible; faster is rarely wise.
Read next
The numbers
Capital gains rules differ more than prices do: nothing in Monaco and Dubai, nothing after ten years in Germany, a flat thirty in Austria, a taper in France. The exit is the part of the return most buyers never model.
The private market
The two documents that separate buyers who see houses from buyers who see listings, and how to handle each without giving anything away.
The Private Letter
One letter a month: what moved in the hotspots, one anonymised sale explained, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.