with my wife we are planning to buy an appartment. The building is brand new.
We tried to ask the seller to get a lower price for the appartement but he says that's impossible as they are just selling and the building doesn't belong to them.
Is it common to ask for a lower price especially for a new property ? (this project has about 100 appartments and about 80% are sold... construction is finishing now so I guess they are in a hurry to get rid of the left flats)
The parking place is 35.000CHF. Can they usuallly lower the price for it ?
It is not in teh nature of all things Swiss to haggle.
That said you could always make an offer to be passed on to the owners. It is likely that towards the end of sales some less desireable ones are left - north facing, no view etc. so they may be open to offers. On the other hand the last 20% is their profit...
sorry, but the private estate buiss in zürich is so much overheated and the demand so high that it is kind of oligopoly market and buyers are willing to pay every price. read the press and youll see that people line up for UBS flats at Bellevue for 22k rent per month and spend silly money on property everywhere in zürich and its canton.
its worth trying but there is no need for them to negotiate the price as everything goes...which is in fact sh*t
We had an experience where we tried to politely negotiate a lower price for an apartment, and the owner was quite offended! He then refused to discuss the sale further with us. We later found out that there were quite a few interested buyers, and it was possible that one of the buyers in fact offered a higher price.
So we are also unsure about whether negotiating property prices is "normal" in Switzerland, or if a buyer should only consider the asking price (or something higher).
I think you should try it, I was going to buy an apartment in Oberglat some years ago and we decided not to ahead and we built a house a little further away, we were offered some additional extra's such an upgraded kitchen and bath but that is only because we mentioned upgrading in the beggining of the puchase of the flat.
The only down turn for this was we did lose 500chf in admins charges because we decided to cancel and build a house instead.
Good luck, you have nothing to loose for dipping your toe in the water.
I was discussing the new-house-build woes of a colleague here with him, and he made the interesting point that as an average customer, you don't know how much things are supposed to cost, so you are not in a position to make estimates for budgets, or to evaluate bills. Invariably important prerequisite items are missing from estimates, giving an illusion of value.
This is obviously not confined to the building industry, but it is not often that suppliers deal in such large amounts of money with unintelligent (as in customers without domain knowledge) customers.
In theory an architect should be able and willing to project-manage and he should know what is required. I wouldn't attempt this yourself as the consequences of a wrong decisions will be borne by you and your tight budget.
If you "reserved" a flat and have not signed anything, then you must have paid a deposit, otherwise a verbal reservation isn't worth the paper it isn't signed on.
If money did pass hands, then they will at least deduct their expenses if you now pull out - and will usually try to say that the deposit is non-refundable...
Most new builds have crap spec: floors - carpets not tiles - and crummey kitchens etc. Be prepared to spend 10% more on fitting to your standards - and this means doors, door handles, taps, basins - everything...
We bought a new apartment many years ago in Neuchatel and asked for discount and although the developers refused (love to but hands are tied etc) they did propose to pay the first 6 months mortgage repayments not much but a discount of sorts. Failing that you can always try and negotiate on finishings or kitchen/bathroom specs.
As everyone says, if you don't ask then you'll never know.
Good point. When you buy a new house, you don't really know how much it is going to cost you in the end. Estimate is that the basic price will increase by approximately 10% when you go to actual shops to choose your kitchen and other fittings because the developers put the cheapest possible fittings (this is where the bulk of their profits come from). But if you want to have something more complex (let's say an attic conversion), the only thing that is certain is that it is going to cost a fortune, but usually no one can tell you even a ballpark figure in advance. So in the end you have a very fuzzy budget plus you have no idea what the interest rates are going to be when the home is actually built.
The conclusion -- difficult to tell if you can actually afford to buy unless you find an extremely reasonably-priced development.
I vote for trying to negotiate up the spec too, and possibly you can agree for them to waive architects fees on any cost over-runs (mehrkosten)
In any event you *really* need to do your homework on the specification (baubeschreib). You will likely find with 100 units in the project you might have choice of finish but not of the suppliers (it simplifies admin and maximises the kickback to the developer). Kitchens and bathrooms are eye-wateringly expensive... dont think 35,000chf will go too far.
Flooring and tiling budget is normally quoted including cost of fitting which will take up about 40chf psqm, so you need at minimum 100chf total for a reasonable standard, 200chf starts to be fairly luxurious. You should go and visit the approved show rooms and actually see what you can get.
Be really careful on things like terrace tiling and anything else that you might not immediately focus on, we had a good spec generally, but this was at 15chf psqm, enough for the cheapest concrete paving slabs.