you mean the only one without?
Well, you’re ready for climat-change and floods obviously. Pretty cool to just go downstairs and paddle off in case of trouble.
Very nice. What is the body of water just next to it?
Rhine
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No floods in Switzerland, the rivers are fed by glaciers melting and if the glaciers disappear then no rivers and no flooding.
…no hydro electricity, no crop irrigation, no lakes, no people.
So I can finally get some peace and quiet!
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This increase correlates pretty much 1:1 with the transaction prices. According to Wüst&Partner they’ve increased by 150% since 2000. Here’s the index chart for self-owned apartments.
Is that so. I thought you lived here a few years by now.
with search for ‘Überflutungen Schweiz’ you can spend all night on the computer, it seems.
Back on topic: @sichuan, maybe check where exactly your overpay. And those cute little streamlets can get rather nasty, we learnt.
What a load of nonsense.
We bought our Multi Family house in Adliswil, quiet spot, parking for 4 vehicles (with 2 blocked in), plus garden, 3 apartments, attic potential for making top floor duplex, for less than 1m chf. Rent from the 2 apartments not used by us covered the mortgage and bills actually. Never needed professional maintenance except for renewing water, abwasser, gas etc when the Stad redid the street. It does look tatty from the outside and would benefit from a repaint, but you can’t see that from inside! Just to illustrate, you can actually live for free, close to a bahnhof. We are looking to move it on to a new owner. It is not that easy to sell TBH!
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Yes, I moved and this is the “nail in the coffin”. No, nothing wrong with the garage, but my allergies have been woken up here despite being higher up in the mountain which should have better air.
Well, now I realized that my appartment, 2.5 for 1.5k/m was a real bargain, no way to rent anything like that below 2k (2k is actually tough to find, yet being lucky to get it).
Thanks for the quality discussion, as usual.
You know, regarding property purchase, when I was young I was leaning to the opinion to buy as large as you can get, but nowadays with no intention to raise a family (rather adopt than raise that’d be the option to be honest), I’m pragmatically selfish, 1.5 would be fine for me. However interestingly you can’t find 1.5 apartments outside Zurich city. This made me think, should I buy 1.5 in Zurich or 2.5 somewhere commutable to Zurich, should I pay so much attention to re-sale trends…
What would a potential purchase price be in relation to your total net worth now? And how do you invest your money today?
From what you are describing, I don’t see any need to buy. It seems to be the usual trade off between living centrally and expensive or cheaper with the cost of a commute. Same applies to renting.
Are you talking of 1/3 of the rent from 20 years ago? The reference rate was above 2.5% back then so rent today would be the same or less. I had a studio in Zurich & the rent + NK was less than I was paying in taxes & running costs of a smaller apartment I owned in Chamonix. Admittedly the Chamonix Apartment increased 3.5 fold in value over 22 years fees included. That’s still under 6% annual return so about half of the expected stock market return.
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I think he means the top one with geraniums on the third floor as opposed to the one on the first floor. The geraniums aren’t as easy to see on the upper balcony rail.
Interesting place. Perhaps someone here wants to buy it!
How long did you own it?
We overpaid, at the time in 2016, for our old townhouse in Zurich which we subsequently renovated. Have no intention of selling, but so far, the best investment I ever made.
chf2,200,000
So in what way do you think you overpaid?
It always puzzles me when people talk about an item’s value as if it’s somehow different from how much you can sell it for. A house is worth exactly as much as someone is prepared to pay for it; you were perhaps prepared to pay more than it was advertised for, but that’s not you overpaying, it’s the seller undervaluing.
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Um, thanks.
In a sense, you are right that overpaid is not the most suitable word.
In our case, we looked for a place to buy, with our own criteria, and it took the best part of 10 years, including around six failed bids with this damn bidding process you often find in Zurich.
So for the last one, we put in what seemed then like a high bid compared to what we thought it was worth and in general for the market at that time. We later found out anecdotally that our bid was the highest but not by much.
Subsequently of course, the value went up a lot. I dont think I suggested that the value is different from the selling price. In fact I see it all as hypothetical. The fact that we could turn a tidy profit on it now is neither here nor there since we dont plan to sell in the near future, and house prices could of course go up or down in that time.
What I am glad of is the following. Upon buying, the sentiment was to expect a 10% fall in the coming years. I accepted that at the time as we wanted the place and had a long term view. Yes, the market rose a lot instead of fell, but what I am also pleased about is that we now have a nice buffer, even if the market should fall again.
The title of this thread is whether it is worth to overpay in Zurich for property. I think we overpaid at the time and given the market as it was, to secure it, but it was worth it. That’s it in a nutshell.
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