Once again significantly fewer rental apartments advertised than in the previous year
Published: Tuesday, Jul 2nd 2024, 16:40
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In Switzerland, fewer and fewer apartments are being advertised for rent on real estate portals. Between April 2023 and March 2024, 340,000 apartments were advertised across Switzerland. This is almost 50,000 properties or 13 percent fewer year-on-year.
This is the result of the online apartment index OWI published on Tuesday, which is calculated by the Swiss Real Estate Institute on behalf of the Swiss Real Estate Association (SVIT) and the Swiss Homeowners Association (HEV). At the same time, the average insertion time fell only slightly by 2 days to 27 days. This indicates falling demand for rental apartments, which in turn could be due to the increase in rents on offer.
Tenants are staying in their apartments because they cannot find new ones at comparable rents, it is said. This further reduces the supply. The cheap apartments and those with up to 3 rooms are affected the most practically everywhere.
Conversely, more tenants appeared to be giving up their more expensive and larger apartments, which could be linked to the rent increase after two rounds of reference interest rates. This increased supply of more expensive, larger apartments conceals the dramatic development in the affordable and smaller apartment segments. Here, the decline is up to 40 percent in some cases. According to the authors of the study, it is no longer possible to speak of a functioning online market in some cases.
"Less and shorter" in almost all cantons
The number of advertised rental apartments is falling in 23 cantons, mostly in the double-digit percentage range, according to the report. Only in the cantons of Geneva, Ticino and Zug were more apartments advertised year-on-year.
In 19 cantons, the shortage in the supply of rental apartments has led to a significant reduction in tendering times in some cases. This is most pronounced in rural cantons close to city centers such as Schaffhausen (-13 days) and Fribourg (-5 days).
At 9 and 14 days respectively, the two central Swiss cantons of Zug and Schwyz had the shortest advertising times, followed by the canton of Zurich. Here, landlords had to wait an average of 15 days before renting out their property. In contrast, apartments in the cantons of Jura and Ticino remained advertised for an average of 54 and 42 days respectively.
©Keystone/SDA
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