Saint-Tropez
Saint-Tropez is the tightest luxury rental market in Europe, and one of the worst investments in it. The season is short and violently concentrated, and a villa that is not booked by March will often stay empty in July.
Roughly 15 June to 15 September, and that is the whole story. Add about ten days at the end of September for Les Voiles. Outside that window, the town is closed and the villas are empty. A well-let villa sells around 45 high-season nights and perhaps 10 more in the shoulder. Not 200. Forty-five.
Staff. A villa with a chef, a housekeeper and a driver is a different product from one without, and it is priced accordingly. That is where the gap between a 1,500 EUR night and a 4,000 EUR night is made.
These figures benchmark a well-maintained, premium 4-bedroom villa, Saint-Tropez. Deliberately not the ultra-prime staffed estates that inflate every published average and make owners believe things that are not true. Rates are then adjusted for bedroom count, condition, and amenities.
Bigger, better, or better-staffed villas earn more, sometimes several times more. Tired properties with a static price and a passive listing earn considerably less. That gap is not luck. It is management.
This is the number nobody publishes, because everyone in the chain benefits from you not knowing it. In Saint-Tropez, a villa let through an agency loses about 35% of everything the guest pays. And that is only the agency's own cut.
The fees stack. If the agency also lists your villa on Airbnb or Booking, the platform takes its share FIRST, and the agency takes its cut on top. Airbnb charges a host around 15.5%. Booking.com charges 10 to 25%, typically 15 to 22% once payment fees and visibility programmes are added. Stack an agency on top of that and 40% is common. We have seen worse.
Managing it yourself looks cheaper, and on paper it is. But 15.5% does not buy you a housekeeper, a plumber at midnight, or someone to answer the guest who wants the pool warmer by tomorrow. Self-management costs you time, and most owners badly underestimate how much.
Thirty years in this trade teaches you things that do not fit in a benchmark: which agencies negotiate, what a fair contract looks like, which clauses cost you a season, and the specific mistakes that quietly halve a villa's income. We will send you that, for your market, free.
Send me the full breakdown →The information is free. Access to it is not anonymous: we ask for your email, and we sometimes introduce you to partners who pay us. That is how this site stays free for owners. We say so plainly rather than bury it.
A well-maintained four-bedroom villa in Saint-Tropez grosses roughly €69,000 to €92,000 a year. That figure comes from 45 nights actually sold at €1,900 in high season and 10 nights at €650 outside it. The top of the range is not the average. It is what an owner reaches with active pricing, fast replies and consistently good reviews.
About 55 nights, in our benchmark. We deliberately do not quote an occupancy percentage. Occupancy multiplied by 365 flatters seasonal markets by a factor of two, because the villa is not on the market for most of the year and nobody is trying to sell it in November. Nights actually sold is the only honest unit.
Gross is what the guest pays. Net is what reaches your bank account, and the gap is far larger than most owners believe. Manage the villa yourself on a platform and you lose about 15.5%. Let it through an agency in Saint-Tropez and you lose about 35%, before a single bill is paid. And the fees stack: if that agency also lists your villa on Airbnb or Booking, the platform fee is deducted as well, and total commissions of 40% or more are common. Our team has worked both sides of this trade, which is how we know. Then subtract cleaning, laundry, pool and garden, utilities and local taxes.
On yield alone, no, and we will not pretend otherwise. Saint-Tropez is bought for the address, not for the income. The nightly rate is high, but the number of nights that genuinely sell is small, and the purchase price is enormous. Anyone showing you a yield that looks attractive here is selling you something. Buy it because you want it. Do not buy it as a return.
Because a nightly rate is set by the view, the finish, the address and the level of service included, and almost never by the bedroom count. We have seen two four-bedroom villas in the same town, one at roughly 1,170 euros a night and one at roughly 9,376, and the difference was a sea view and a concierge. Any benchmark built on price per bedroom is meaningless, and most published ones are.
From an operator who has worked Saint-Tropez directly, not from scraping a listing site. Where a public dataset exists we cross-check against it, and where it disagrees with what we have seen on the ground we say so. Figures are declared, never audited, and we would rather be conservative and right than optimistic and wrong.
Four questions. An honest estimate, and a free report on what would raise it. We are paid by our partners, never by you.
Estimate my villa →Estimates are based on destination benchmarks and property attributes, not on a formal appraisal. Amounts are shown in local currency using approximate conversion rates. Actual results depend on marketing, pricing strategy and seasonality. Last updated 14/07/2026.