At €188,000 a square metre, Monaco sets the world’s most expensive floor

In April, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, had bought a flat in Monaco for €471mn, through his holding company SCM. The flat is in Le Renzo, a building in Mareterra, the six-hectare district the principality has built on land reclaimed from the Mediterranean.

It has five floors, 21 rooms, a private pool and about 2,500 square metres of interior space, not counting the terraces. That works out at roughly €188,400 a square metre. It is reported to be the most expensive flat ever sold.

Price per square metre is the most useful way to compare places where the very rich choose to live. It strips out the size of the house and leaves the price of the address.

The Mediterranean floor

Akhmetov’s price is an outlier even in Monaco. Local agents put the average for new-build flats in Mareterra, where Renzo Piano and Norman Foster designed buildings, at about €71,000 a square metre, with the best units above €100,000.

UBS, in its annual survey of luxury property, puts Monaco’s top market at a minimum of $60,000 a square metre, level with Aspen in Colorado.

The Alps

The only market UBS ranks above Monaco is St Moritz, where luxury homes average about CHF52,000 a square metre. Gstaad and Verbier follow at about CHF45,000. Cologny, on the shore of Lake Geneva, is at CHF43,000, and Küsnacht, on Lake Zurich, at CHF37,000.

UBS says Swiss luxury prices rose 3 per cent on average in 2025, and 6 per cent in the mountain resorts, which are up about 40 per cent over five years. Its separate survey of holiday homes puts upscale chalets and flats in Gstaad at about CHF25,000 a square metre and in St Moritz at CHF24,000, lower than the luxury figures because they include more ordinary properties.

The lakes and the cities

Lake Como produced its own record in January, when Villa La Cassinella, near the Villa del Balbianello in Tremezzina, was sold for more than €90mn to a Russian-born hotelier based in St Moritz, according to Italian reports. Waterfront villas on the lake are sold so rarely that each sale becomes the benchmark.

Big cities look almost cheap by comparison. New flats in Tokyo’s 23 wards averaged about ¥2.3mn a square metre in the first months of 2026, around €13,000, according to the property portal LIFULL, even though prices there have risen above the peak of Japan’s 1980s bubble.

What the numbers say

The most expensive floor space in the world is not in the financial capitals where the fortunes are made. It is in a handful of small places, a principality, two Alpine villages and a lake, where supply is fixed by geography and local rules and the buyers are the same few thousand families.

Akhmetov’s €471mn could buy about 36,000 square metres of new flats in Tokyo. In Mareterra it bought 2,500, and a sea view that nobody else can have.

Sources

• Monaco Tribune: Ukraine’s richest man buys a €471mn flat in Mareterra (Apr 2026)
• MySweetImmo: Monaco breaks the record for the world’s most expensive flat
• UBS: new record prices in the luxury real estate market (6 May 2026)
• UBS Alpine Property Focus 2026: holiday homes highly priced, highly sought after
• Montenapo Daily: Villa La Cassinella sold for a record sum (15 Jan 2026)
• LIFULL: Tokyo 23-ward new flat prices, 2026

Cover image: David from Washington, DC, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Cropped.