For a modest house on the shores of Lake Zurich, you will have to pay 2.5 million francs
As reported by Swissinfo.ch, this is stated in a recent study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), conducted jointly with the price and tariff comparison site comparis.ch. The experts made their conclusions by examining 1.5 million offers for the sale of residential real estate – houses and apartments – in 166 municipal units of the country in the period from the beginning of 2005 to June 2017.
The study is part of a project aimed at providing buyers and sellers of real estate with reliable information on price dynamics across the country, literally in every corner, even the most remote. Based on the results, an interactive map with prices per square meter of housing throughout Switzerland was compiled.
The experts concluded that apartments on the shores of Lake Zurich have risen in price the most. And only the Zurich suburb of Bülach remained at the same level: here real estate is simply terribly expensive, it has not become even more "terribly expensive," which, perhaps, should already be considered as positive news.
Topping the ranking of the most expensive real estate is Zurich. Today, for one square meter of housing here, they ask 13,000 Swiss francs (351,000 hryvnias), which is 97% more than in 2007. In this sense, the city on the Limmat River is much more attractive in terms of real estate than Hong Kong or London, where a square meter of housing costs $28,000 and $17,610, respectively. However, according to the Numbeo portal, which has collected statistics on housing prices, Geneva and Zurich, one way or another, still rank among the ten most expensive cities in the world.
The most affordable apartments for purchase can be found in the town of Le Locle in the canton of Neuchâtel at an average cost of a modest 3,250 francs per square meter. An interesting deal can also be made in the canton of Valais, in the southwest of the country, where as many as five municipalities made it into the top ten areas with the lowest apartment prices in Switzerland.
Similar results apply to the purchase of entire houses. The price of a medium-sized house (5 to 6.5 rooms) in the canton of Zurich is 2.5 million francs, which is interesting to compare with just 350,000 francs in the Valle Maggia region of the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. For comparison, the average price for a four-bedroom house in San Francisco is $2.1 million as of October 2018.
The experts who released the study also attempted to analyze how real the risk of a "bubble" in the real estate market is. As a result, none of the country's regions were deemed "critical," although it would be worth "keeping an eye" on the situation in the regions of the cities of Thun (canton of Bern), Lucerne, Sursee (near Lucerne), Aarau (between Zurich and Bern), and Bülach.