Or if you want to buy a second home/rental property. I am not sure of the regulations, but a C permit does allow you this.
I know of similar cases, they put a fixed price (below market value) and there were tons of bidders. They didn’t entertain over-bids but instead asked for a motivation letter and sold based on that (my friend won it).
I won’t go into details for privacy reasons, but there’s no way if you looked at it objectively that my friend should have got it as others were ‘more deserving’ but there were some things that he wrote that resonated with the seller.
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To be fair, the guy seemed like a nice person who wanted to respect his wife’s wish to sell to a nice family so I bought into that. It just felt silly to enter this kind of “competition” tbh, the family presentation, “motivation letter”, pictures…all felt wrong at the end of the day. Maybe we could have gotten the apt, who knows…but I don’t feel sorry we missed that opportunity. He was a bit surprised (disappointed?) we just gave up. 
Twenty years ago I bought the flat I was renting since then my monthly payments (mortgage, Nebenkosten, maintenance fund) have averaged under 60% of my monthly rental so it turned out to be a good deal.
With those monthly payments I have also reduced my mortgage by around CHF 110,000.
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I think it is fairly common as sometimes people want to make sure they sell to someone who will not create problems in the neighbourhood and so have a negative impact on their former neighbours.
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Also bear in mind that here in Switzerland you never pay your mortgage off like you would in the UK. To offset that you can claim your mortgage/interest on your Swiss tax returns, but it is something to consider if you think you may still be here when you retire and your income drops.
Plus interest rates are so low here. I was paying 15% in the UK in 1990. Currently I am on year 3 of an 8 year interest-only mortgage at 0.82%.
The fact that 1% is paid by a previous employer makes me wish I had a 10 million loan…
You can choose to amortise your mortgage here to eventually pay it off.
Of course, I would also prefer to sell to someone who I think would be a good fit for the building, but what do you do if most potential buyers are in fact, a good fit (have seen the people who visited before us and frankly how would you argue you’re more “deserving”?) They would have probably just picked the Swiss family which makes the whole game kind of hypocritical.
In our case the price was definitely not bellow market value which is why they didn’t go for over-bids (was already fairly high) and instead entertained the idea of some sort of “hunger games”…to each their own.
I sense that you were put out by this requirement, but sometimes things are a bit different and it is just part of the process e.g. I found it strange to attach photos to CVs when applying for jobs.
I explained why we were put off. It was just silly. I actually considered going along and then it just struck me.
I don’t find strange to attach photos to CVs to be fair.
Buying a house is a totally different process. We talked to that guy quite a bit, he could already see we’re interested and probably close to what he had in mind as potential buyers. I got it there were more people in a similar position but it just looked like going over the board to get “picked” when in fact he didn’t do anyone any favour.
It took us 8 years of looking to find something we liked, in an area we liked, and that we could afford to bid on.
We made multiple bids that failed. Several times we had the feeling we were ruled out because we were a couple without kids. This always rubbed me up the wrong way. Perhaps if I ever come to sell, I’ll take the opposite approach and let potential families know that they aren’t suitable, couples without kids welcome.
I still do. It’s an invitation to discriminate on multiple grounds.
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It’s just part of the process.
That’s the thing, unless it was an auction and your bid just failed, you can never know why exactly you’ve been ruled out for. It seems unbelievable people have to look for a suitable house for so many years given the Swiss prices.
Well, on two occasions we were told directly that the sellers are favouring selling to a family, so actually we did know.
As to the timeline, we bid on about 6 properties during the time. As for the others, maybe it was a question of price. But we had our criteria, it should be a house, it should be close to a tram line in Zurich, it should have a central location but a residential feel, and a budget of X.
Once or twice we passed up opportunities that perhaps we should have pursued more vigorously, or we should have bid higher. One house we actually got and were about to sign the papers when the estate agent must have received a higher bid and dropped us.
In the area we were renting, which we liked a lot, pretty much no houses of any price came up for sale, as in desirable areas often property is sold not on the open market.
Well, it took my family quite a long time to find a house within our budget, so when an ad was posted in the village where we rented an apt, I took those of our kids who were in their cutest years “for a walk” to have a chat with the owners if they happened to be in their garden (a charm offensive)
And we agreed to a 9 month deferred sale
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Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. It was the craziest thing we encountered; I still think it was. It wasn’t in our town btw.
We are property owners now, no biggie. In fact I think it was better that way.
Same here, but he didn’t say it was a higher bid (which we guessed it was), he made up some excuse (something something about the owner) and that was it.
Thought you could do that with the smaller mortgage, but not the bigger one.
It could be, I do not know.
I had two the same size and reduced one.