Inside The World’s Most Expensive Neighborhood: Monaco's Mareterra

Today on Forbes, inside the world's most expensive neighborhood, 550 million dollar apartments, F1 stars, and billionaires. On a June morning during the Formula One Grand Prix weekend, thousands of F1 fans and tourists flooded into Monaco, the postcard-sized principality on the French Riviera. Along the two-mile circuit, just after Turn 8, visitors milled about its newest neighborhood, Maraterra, a 15-acre luxury development built directly on the Mediterranean Sea. Even walking along Maraterra's waterfront plazas under the cantilevered Lorenzo, a 17-story residential tower designed by Pritzker-prize-winning Italian architect Renzo Piano, to look like a fragmented vessel emerging from a shipyard, there's a clear view of the superyachts moored off the Mediterranean coast and the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise apartments above. Looking out over a balcony, Bernard d'Alessandri, the general secretary of the nearby Monaco Yacht Club, says, There's a billion dollars' worth of yachts in the bay, minimum, and another billion here in the port. But the money spent on those superyachts pales in comparison to what buyers have dropped for homes in Maraterra. Every one of its 130 apartments and villas sold out before the neighborhood, which took 11 years and cost some $2.3 billion to build, was completed in December 2024. The project was the brainchild of Monaco's ruling head of state, Prince Albert II, and Patrice Pastor, a local real estate billionaire and Maraterra's largest investor. From the beginning, it was designed to be an ultra-exclusive club even in the rarefied world of Monaco. Each one of the original buyers was personally interviewed and approved by Pastor and Guy Thomas Levy-Sussan, the project's managing director. And would-be buyers could not offload those conversations to their assistants. Levy-Sussan told Lifestyle magazine Rob Report in 2023, We refuse to talk to any middlemen. If you cannot spend one hour with us presenting the project to you, we're not interested for you to live in this building. Now, some of those original homes are already hitting the market at wildly higher prices less than two years after they were finished. Due to the project's secrecy, there is no reliable data on the number of resales or even the average price. But some apartments are being offered at $12,900 per square foot, according to local brokers, a 33% premium compared to what some original buyers paid. Monthly rents, meanwhile, go up to more than $130,000. A 5,650-square-foot apartment in Lorenzo is currently on the market for $73 million, a price equating to about $12,990 per square foot. Twice as expensive as even the toniest parts of Dubai. Silvio Piras, the managing partner of brokerage Piras Real Estate, says, quote, We've had a wave of clients from Dubai. People want new, large, and modern homes. Meanwhile, the villas, including one listing for a six-bedroom, 41,700-square-foot villa with such amenities as a wine-tasting room, indoor and outdoor pools, a spa, sauna, massage room, and private theater, are expected to break records. Florian Valeri, the founder of brokerage Barnes Valeri Agency, says, quote, These villas are so big that we're talking about more than 200 million euros as a starting price. That's the equivalent to approximately $230 million, and those are for the ones with no water views. For the seven villas on the seafront, the only homes built directly on Monaco's coastline, prices could top $290 million, according to Valeri. Another broker Forbes spoke to predicts those will sell for some $350 million. Some deep-pocketed buyers are holding out until they can acquire one of those seafront villas, no matter the price. Real estate broker Sofia Kiekbaeva of Magre & Sons Monaco says, quote, I have a client who asked about the villas in Maratera, and so far there's just two on the second row. He's still asking me if I can find something on the seafront. Despite all the secrecy, one high-profile sale at Maratera has already smashed all previous property records around the world. In April, Bloomberg revealed that Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov had purchased a 21-room, five-floor apartment atop Lorenzo for some $550 million in 2021, breaking the record for the most expensive home sale. The previous record was set by former billionaire Pan Sutong, who spent $319 million for a three-story home overlooking the Deepwater Bay golf course in Hong Kong in 2017. It's also more than double the $240 million that billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin paid in 2019 for his Manhattan penthouse, still the most expensive home ever sold in the United States. Akhmetov paid about $20,370 per square foot, roughly double the $10,420 per square foot Griffin paid, and more than triple the average home price in Monaco of $6,200 per square foot, a figure that's nearly double the next most expensive city in the world, Hong Kong. For full coverage and to find out more about Monaco, check out Giacomo Tagni's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.