Ona June morning during the Formula 1 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, Mareterra, a 15-acre luxury development built directly on the Mediterranean Sea.

Even walking along Mareterra’s waterfront plazas under the cantilevered Le Renzo—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 is a clear view of the superyachts moored off the Mediterranean coast and the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise apartments above.

“There’s a billion dollars’ worth of yachts in the bay, minimum,” says Bernard D’Alessandri, the general secretary of the nearby Monaco Yacht Club, looking out over a balcony. “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 Mareterra. 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.

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The project was the brainchild of Monaco’s ruling head of state, Prince Albert II, and Patrice Pastor, a local real estate billionaire and Mareterra’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 were personally interviewed and approved by Pastor and Guy Thomas Levy-Soussan, the project’s managing director. And would-be buyers could not offload those conversations to their assistants: “We refused to talk to any middlemen,” Levy-Soussan told lifestyle magazine Robb Report in 2023. “If you cannot spend one hour with us presenting the project to you, we’re not interested for you to live in this building.” (Levy-Soussan and Pastor both declined to speak with Forbes for this article.)

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 Le Renzo 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. “We’ve had a wave of clients from Dubai,” says Silvio Piras, the managing partner of brokerage Piras Real Estate. “People want new, large and modern homes.”

Meanwhile the villas—including one listing for a 6-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. “These villas are so big that we're talking about more than 200 million........

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