The seasonal rental market around Megève: what the figures actually say

6 min read

Figures quoted about the rental market around Megève are often approximate. We wanted to work only from verifiable public sources — INSEE, the tourist offices and official press kits — and discard anything we could not corroborate. Here is what those figures actually say about the five communes where we manage chalets and apartments.

Five communes, one shared imbalance

The first figure is the most striking. In these villages the second home is not the exception. It is the norm.

In Megève there are roughly five second homes for every primary residence: 7,831 against 1,508. Most of the commune’s housing stock, in other words, is not lived in year-round. These are INSEE 2023 census figures; older data with different values is still widely mirrored, so always check the year.

Megève: the heart of the market

The resort’s official press kit for winter 2025/26 gives the real scale: 37,935 tourist beds and 1,195,000 overnight stays in the winter season alone, across a 400 km ski area.

The more interesting point for an owner lies elsewhere: 60% of winter visitors are international, against 40% French. Guests travelling from far away book earlier, stay longer and expect a fully equipped property with someone reachable on the ground. That is precisely the profile of a season-long rental rather than a conventional lease.

Combloux: the cold-bed question

A “cold bed”, in resort vocabulary, is a sleeping place occupied only a few weeks a year — typically a second home its owner uses occasionally and never rents out.

In a January 2024 presentation, the Combloux tourist office put the commune’s stock at roughly 13,000 tourist beds, of which close to 70% were cold beds. It is the most telling figure in this whole file: in a commune that recorded 240,000 overnight stays between 17 June and 26 August 2023, up 13.5% on the previous summer, most of the accommodation capacity sits unused for most of the year.

For an owner that is less a statistic than an observation: a dormant property is not neutral. It keeps costing in charges, property tax and upkeep, and it deteriorates faster than one that is lived in and looked after.

Praz-sur-Arly: a season that is growing

Praz-sur-Arly recorded 324,200 overnight stays in winter 2025/26, against 312,000 the previous winter — a rise of about 3.9%. With 74.7% second homes for just 1,311 permanent residents, the village has an accommodation capacity out of all proportion to its population.

It is also the only one of our villages outside Évasion Mont-Blanc: the skiing here is the Espace Diamant, with its own pass.

Cordon: the best balance between the two seasons

Cordon takes around 178,000 overnight stays a year across 3,705 tourist beds, with 30% international visitors. But the figure that matters here is the split: 59% of nights in winter, 41% in summer.

Elsewhere winter dominates everything. In Cordon, summer is close to half the activity — which changes how a property can be worked across the year.

Demi-Quartier: the proximity effect

With 801 permanent residents to 1,766 dwellings, 1,287 of them second homes (72.9%), Demi-Quartier lives in Megève’s immediate orbit. Some tourism studies treat “Megève–Demi-Quartier” as a single destination. For an owner that means the same clientele as Megève, on different land values.

What the valley is actually worth

The commune-by-commune figures describe local demand. The tourism observatory of the Pays du
Mont-Blanc gives the scale of the whole. Over the winter of 2024/25 the area recorded around
3.277 million overnight stays, 47% of them generated by international visitors, with
an average stay of 5.6 days.

It is the next figure that matters most to an owner. Visitors spent roughly €557 million
over the season, and the largest category of spending is neither lift passes nor restaurants: it is
accommodation, at €171.2 million — 30% of the total, up 18.1% on the previous winter.

Put another way: accommodation is the valley’s biggest market, and it is the one growing fastest.
A property left shut does not merely earn nothing — it sits outside the only category of tourist
spending growing at double digits.

That 5.6-day average deserves a careful reading. It describes the market as a whole, which is
overwhelmingly made up of short stays. Season-long rental speaks to a much narrower audience — but
one whose basket, by definition, is counted in months rather than nights.

What this means if you own a property

Three things come out of these figures.

The demand exists and it is measured. More than a million winter nights in Megève, 324,200 in Praz-sur-Arly, 178,000 in Cordon: these are not projections, they are seasons already recorded.

The supply is largely under-used. Close to 70% cold beds in Combloux, more than 7,800 second homes in Megève: the limiting factor is not the number of properties, it is the number actually brought to market and properly looked after.

The clientele is international and demanding. Six visitors in ten in Megève come from abroad. They do not view before booking, they do not know the valley, and they expect everything to work on arrival. That is where local management makes the difference — or where its absence does the damage.

What this means if you are looking to rent

The same figures read the other way. The available stock is vast, but a large part of it is never offered for rent: what is genuinely accessible, properly equipped and looked after by a team on the ground is a fraction of the total. In the busiest weeks, you feel it.

And if you are looking at summer, Cordon and Combloux deserve a particular look: their summer activity is not an afterthought.

What we left out

Several figures circulate about this market that we deliberately discarded for want of a verifiable source: a count of beds rented directly between private individuals in Combloux, a ratio comparing the yield of a professional bed with that of a cold bed, and occupancy rates by accommodation type that we could not find in the documents they were credited to. We would rather publish five solid figures than twenty unverifiable ones.

Commune by commune: Megève, Combloux, Demi-Quartier, Praz-sur-Arly and Cordon. And if you are looking to rent: our chalets and our apartments in Megève.