Courchevel festivities

The Courchevel season turns on a small number of weeks. Across that stretch, marketing, welcoming guests, upkeep and technical work have to follow one another without a gap. Splitting them between several providers multiplies the places where things break. A single contact also changes what is known about the house. A chalet that is let gets visited every week: its condition, how it behaves in winter and where it is weak are all known, which then helps in valuing it, improving it or selling it. The argument holds above all for owners who live far from the resort and cannot get there mid-season.

Every valuation rests on a comparison, and in Courchevel comparables are scarce. The market is narrow: for larger apartments, only around twenty sales show up in the public records since January 2023, at roughly 2.8 million euros and 21,700 euros per square metre. That small volume rules out applying a mechanical price per square metre. One building holds very unequal units depending on the floor, the aspect, the view and whether the slopes can be reached from the door. Three things therefore go into the figure: recent transactions in that village, the condition observed during a visit, and the letting return, which weighs heavily on the decision to sell or to hold.

Putting the chalet on the market and choosing who stays, handing over the keys on arrival and at departure, cleaning between groups, regular maintenance, watching the technical side and calling in trades when it is needed. In Courchevel, the difficulty is the pace. Weeks follow one another without a break right through the winter, with guests leaving and arriving on the same day. A house running like that wears quickly, and a fault left alone reaches the next guests. The quiet months exist for exactly that: putting right what has shifted, replacing what needs it and preparing the coming winter. It is the unseen part of rental management, and the part that separates two chalets of similar standing.

It should. Courchevel is not a single resort but four villages set at different heights, and they do not work the same way. The highest, Courchevel 1850, holds the largest properties and the highest prices. Moriond, Courchevel Village and Le Praz, below it, answer different plans, with budgets that do not overlap. A buyer who looks only at 1850 often misses a property lower down that would suit them better, and the reverse happens just as much. That means knowing each village other than through listings: the buildings, the access to the slopes, which areas stay alive during the day and which empty out. Homebooker follows all four, as well as the other Alpine resorts.