Alpine Property Finders in the Financial Times

A blizzard of regulations aims to avoid soulless low seasons and help year-round residents.

   11 November 2025

The French mountain town of Chamonix is arguably Europe’s most year-round resort. Those who come in winter for the steep couloirs of Les Grands Montets and the family-friendly slopes of Les Houches are almost equal in number to those coming to hike, bike and climb in the summer, making Chamonix one of the most desirable second-home destinations in the Alps.

For property owners, however, there’s some black ice in the snow. With up to 70 per cent of Chamonix’s housing stock qualifying as second homes, and weekly rental properties in high demand, local residents and seasonal workers find themselves priced out. To counter this, Chamonix became the first French ski resort to adopt the so-called Airbnb Law (Loi Le Meur), imposing a range of restrictions. Combined with new urban planning rules, plan local d’urbanisme (PLU), it means that from this year, no construction will be allowed to build new second homes. Property offered for short-term rental (less than 90 days a year) must have formal authorisation from the local authority, and private owners are restricted to one second home throughout most of the valley.

“You can still buy in Chamonix, but you’re now restricted to resale homes, and anyone [developer or plot owner] who does get permission to build a property bigger than 200 sq m must provide affordable housing as well,” says Jeremy Rollason, head of Savills Ski. “It’s challenging throughout the French Alps. Developers are responding by building increasingly private and luxurious chalets that work within the new planning rules. They can’t build quantity so they are building quality. In Meribel, in The Three Valleys, it took four years to get planning permission on a superb ski-in-and-out apartment project priced at more than €45,000 per sq m. Five years ago it would have been nearly half that, but in another five years, there are unlikely to be any more new build projects so prices are likely to go one way only.”

France is the latest country to regulate its Alpine property market, but it is following a well-flexed trend to avoid “cold beds” that leave a resort soullessly empty for low-season weeks, to make property more affordable for locals, and now more than ever, to encourage more year-round residents. But does it work?

Austria has long adopted measures to restrict second-home ownership, especially for foreigners. When it joined the EU in 1995, the principle of free movement of capital required it to allow EU nationals to buy. But while Brexit slammed the door for British passport holders, even European citizens hoping to buy an Austrian holiday home face difficulties.

Austria has two main types of holiday home: those that can only be used as holiday lets (touristische vermietung) and second homes (zweitwohnsitz) which have no rental obligation and can be used exclusively by the owner. “In 2017, Austrian provinces of Tyrol and Salzburg decreed that if a property had not been used for touristic renting prior to January 1 2018 it could not be rented in future,” says Giles Gale, founder of Alpine Property Finders. These strict rules were designed to ensure that housing supply is retained for locals and to push tourists into hotels, many of them small family-run businesses.

But it caused “a frantic rush to register homes for rentals”, says Gale. “Today, Austrian properties with permits allowing holiday rentals are scarce. Austria has no inheritance tax so owners tend to hold on to their mountain homes.” This October, around only 4 per cent of homes in Salzburg province on Willhaben, Austria’s Rightmove, were zweitwohnsitz. (The rest were main residences that can’t be let.)

"On the whole, these rules are not saying you cannot come and buy but rather that you can’t leave a home empty, and empty homes kill resorts".

Those with rental permits also carry a premium in ski resorts — creating a two-tier system. Gale cites the example of two identical 150 sq m apartments in the ski resort of Kaprun. One designated as a main residence would be around €900,000, while one with a rental permit would be €1.5mn. “It’s almost impossible for Brits to buy a holiday home in most main ski regions of Austria and many Dutch, Belgian and German buyers are deterred by the restrictions,” he adds. “They cannot believe that France is relatively restriction free.”

One way around the rules has been for Alpine developers to build “aparthotels” — hotels with self-contained apartments that qualify as commercial residences, and which can easily be rented out like rooms in a hotel. In Switzerland, Residence de la Couronne in high-altitude Grimentz is an aparthotel with one to four-bedroom homes from SFr748,000 ($929,441). Gale is selling homes at the Adler Resort in Austria’s Hinterglemm, a family-run hotel converted in 2018 with resale properties priced from €420,000.

International clients unable to buy in Austria are more frequently turning to Switzerland. Here there are “restrictions and higher prices but there are many more available properties than in Austria”, says Gale. “We’re seeing more Americans buying there, encouraged by its economic and personal safety.” Andermatt Swiss Alps chief commercial officer Russell Collins reports 2025 sales of SFr23mn to US buyers compared with SFr6mn in the same period last year, and a 125 per cent increase in inquiries in that period. Growth in demand from US buyers has, says Collins, been the “defining trend of 2025”.

Switzerland has imposed constraints on foreign ownership since 1961, culminating in the Lex Koller law, introduced in 1985, with its strict permit quotas on residential Alpine property. Non-Swiss nationals or those without a B or C Swiss residency permit must compete for the 1,500 permits issued annually. These apply only for second homes in specific holiday areas, mainly mountain resorts or around Montreux and Lugano; the Valais, an area that includes Verbier and Crans-Montana, receives the largest allocation. These second homes, only one per applicant, must not exceed 200 sq m or have a land plot of more than 1,000 sq m — and they cannot be sold at a profit for five years. Lex Koller applies on a federal basis but each of Switzerland’s 26 cantons can set individual buying and selling charges.

The Lex Webber ruling in 2012 added a further step, capping second homes at a maximum of 20 per cent across most ski resorts.

“When Lex Webber was introduced, the main Swiss resorts already had well over 20 per cent of their stock as second homes, some as much as 80 per cent, and for new buyers this seemed a potential disaster,” says Alex Koch de Gooreynd, partner at Knight Frank. However, “The biggest resorts responded, Crans-Montana, Verbier and Villars among them, by investing heavily in their infrastructure to encourage more people to live there full-time. They added international schools and ensured excellent rail access that integrated seamlessly with their lifts. It was hugely successful. As more of us work remotely, these resorts are where people want to be.” He adds that Verbier recently reported a more than 10 per cent increase this year on applications for primary residency.

The result, says Koch de Gooreynd, is that the premium on second homes with permission to rent, once as high as 40 to 45 per cent, has fallen to 15-20 per cent in Verbier. Five years ago, only a handful of his clients per year were looking to buy a primary residence in the Alps. Today, it’s a third of his clients; many want to move from Geneva, others are in he UK and are looking at Switzerland because of tax changes at home.

“Crans-Montana has seen many people relocate full-time,” says Koch de Gooreynd. The resort is south-facing with great sunshine, and the skiing domain is controlled by Vail Resorts. It’s hugely popular with people from Geneva, much like the Cotswolds is with Londoners.”

Yet even if this “full appetite for healthy year-round mountain living” continues, he points out that it makes sense to consider buying a property with second-home authorisation. When you come to sell, it will attract a wider audience.

Switzerland’s rules don’t appear to be putting off international buyers. While most of buying agency Alpine Property Intelligence’s (API) work in 2018 was in France, for the past 18 months, Switzerland is where their clients want to be, says the company’s co-director David Bhagat.

“The Swiss franc has a safety status,” he says. “There are political and economic concerns around France. Macron has kept the wealth tax on property and many buyers are concerned it could be extended. Buyers see Austria as too restrictive and so they default — happily — to Switzerland. It has zero interest rates and build quality is regarded as excellent.”

But despite the increasing year-round lure and restrictions on second homes, “the value of property in a ski resort [ultimately continues to be] defined by the credentials of the skiing it offers”, insists API’s co-director Charlie McKee.

“Money is chasing the snowline. The number of snow-sure resorts is falling, and the price gap between higher and lower resorts is increasing. Yes, the importance of the summer season is growing but many summer sports do not require high altitude. Skiing does.”

He points to Megève, the celeb-studded, picturesque but low (1,100m French resort where he says there are currently around 30 chalets for sale at or more than €5mn. “In 2021 that would have been three. [It’s now] a clear buyer’s market,” he adds. “Meanwhile, Verbier at 1,500 metres, has a severe shortage of similarly priced homes.”

The housing issues that are being attempted to be addressed in these resorts are an echo of those in high-demand, low-supply holiday markets worldwide. “On the whole, these rules are not saying you cannot come and buy but rather that you can’t leave a home empty,” says Gale. “Empty homes kill resorts; I cannot fault the logic.”

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