Tag Archives: Property

As inflation rises around the world, Switzerland feels the heat too. This week the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) published data on construction, which show an unusually large jump in costs. © Spunky1234 | Dreamstime.comThe costs of construction leapt 2.7% between April and October 2021, according to the data, leaving prices 4.1% higher than a year earlier. The construction index contains both civil engineering works and building construction. Between April and October 2021, the...

© Cristianzamfir | Dreamstime.com Finding a place to live in Switzerland is difficult. Home availability is low and prices are high. On 13 September 2021, the Federal Statistical Office published data showing a sharp drop in the number of vacant homes since 2020, a development that will make home hunting harder. On 1 June 2021, there were 71,365 vacant homes in Switzerland, representing 1.54% of the total stock of housing. Since 1 June 2020, the number of vacant...

© Cristianzamfir | Dreamstime.com Finding a place to live in Switzerland is difficult. Home availability is low and prices are high. On 13 September 2021, the Federal Statistical Office published data showing a sharp drop in the number of vacant homes since 2020, a development that will make home hunting harder. On 1 June 2021, there were 71,365 vacant homes in Switzerland, representing 1.54% of the total stock of housing. Since 1 June 2020, the number of vacant...

Finding a place to live in Switzerland is difficult. Home availability is low and prices are high. On 13 September 2021, the Federal Statistical Office published data showing a sharp drop in the number of vacant homes since 2020, a development that will make home hunting harder. © Cristianzamfir | Dreamstime.comOn 1 June 2021, there were 71,365 vacant homes in Switzerland, representing 1.54% of the total stock of housing. Since 1 June 2020, the number of vacant homes has dropped by 7,467,...

In Switzerland, home owners must add a fictional or imputed rent to their taxable income, which is calculated based on the home’s floor area. Proposals to eliminate imputed rent have been around for sometime. This week, the Federal Council came out in support of a plan to eliminate it put forward earlier by a commission of the Council of States, Switzerland’s upper house. © Pavalache Stelian | Dreamstime.comThe Federal Council’s main motivation for changing the current system, which also...

The latest UBS Swiss Real Estate Bubble Index published this week shows several regions at risk of overheating property prices. © Annanahabed | Dreamstime.comThe regions highlighted as exposed include Basel, Lausanne, Vevey, parts of the Vaud Alps, Lugano, Nidwalden, Luzern, Zug and the Zurich region, all parts of Switzerland where there is plenty of high paid work. Lausanne, Basel, Zug, Luzern and parts of the Zurich region are described as having fundamental risk, while Vevey and...

In our July 29 post titled How Gold Stacks Up Against Stocks, Property, Commodities and Big Macs! we showed readers charts of gold as a ratio to other assets and products. We discussed that gold competes with crypto and stocks for the investment dollars. It was clear that gold as a ratio of the S&P 500 Index and of the broader MCSI World Equity Index show that gold is ‘relatively cheap’ compared to these measures. But then we showed that this wasn’t the...

Those with a migration background in Switzerland are on average financially worse off than those without, according to data from the Federal Statistical Office. And those with a migration background pay on average 10% more per square metre of living space than the rest of the population. © | Dreamstime.comIn Switzerland, around 20% of those with a migration background have trouble making ends meet, compared to 7% of the rest of the population. On average, people without a migration...

Some agencies in Geneva are exploiting the city’s tight property market by charging people money just to view apartments, according to a report by RTS. © Bogdan Lazar | Dreamstime.comA practice described as parasitic by ASLOCA, a rental association, involves an agency contacting those who have placed adverts for vacant apartments and offering them their services. The agency promises to find tenants at no cost to the advertiser if they take down their advert. It then makes its money by...

Recently published statistics show that 36% of homes are owned by those who live in them, a rate that falls to 12% in municipalities with more than 100,000 residents. Lausanne © Ocskay Mark | Dreamstime.comSwiss municipalities with the highest rates of home ownership (37%) have between 10,000 and 15,000 residents, a rate exceeding the smallest municipalities of less than 10,000 residents (31%). At a cantonal level, the cantons with the lowest rates of home ownership were Geneva...