Second home in Èze: the guide

The loyalty of Èze owners rests on access. Monaco is ten minutes away, Nice and its airport twenty-five: a second home here is reached for a weekend without the journey eating into the stay. The TER links the lower village to Nice along the corniche, the village road climbs above the coast. Once settled, everything plays out between the station below and the access roads above: the commune comes down to a drop in height that one learns to love.

The season counts too. The village lives to the rhythm of its visitors, intense from June to September, and returns to its inhabitants in the evening; the seafront follows the summer; the corniche keeps Èze all year round. A corniche villa is therefore used twelve months a year, when the village and the beach empty: that is where the address reveals its real value in use. Monaco completes daily life, restaurants, services and schools; Nice, the airport and the city.

The real question of a second home is the time between stays, and in Èze it is asked on a slope. A corniche villa lives on steep ground: private lanes to maintain, retaining walls, rainwater, terraces, pool, a garden facing south. All of this costs more than on flat land and calls for a concierge or a seasoned company, which the area knows well. An apartment in Èze-Bord-de-Mer is managed more simply, once the minutes of the general meetings and the charges have been read, and once you have checked, windows open, what the railway does to the quiet.

Two obligations are read before the offer. In a zone exposed to fire, brush clearance is compulsory within fifty metres of the buildings, whether the house is closed or not. Off mains drainage, the individual system is inspected by the SPANC, and a non-compliant installation is costed before buying. The works are costed before the offer, never after. Home Select builds this logic of absence into the selection from the start: what the villa costs when you are not there, who calls by, who opens up, who looks at the slope after the rains.

In Èze, the view justifies the price, and it can close: a building or a planting on the neighbouring plot is enough. Before any offer, the cadastral plan, the history of planning permissions and what remains buildable around are read at the town hall: it is the one check that truly counts here. The other pitfalls are those of the slope, soil surveys, private lanes and easements, and, below, the passing of the train: none of this can be read in a listing.

The market is livelier in spring and from September, but the fine villas trade without a season, as successions and private decisions dictate, most often without a listing or a portal: watchfulness must be continuous, that is the price of rare addresses. Home Select keeps it from its management, with its network of 15,000 partners, receives more than 100 off-market properties every day and monitors 1,700 listing sites. Each shortlisted property is qualified on documents, then pre-viewed on video by Home Select with the seller’s agent; the price is set against comparable DVF sales; you come only once, for the decisive viewings, grouped into a single trip, and a power of attorney lets you sign without coming back. Home Select’s fees are due 100% on success, nothing before the deed.