Is there any way in Zurich Canton of finding out how much was actually last paid for a property ? I have used old adverts on Comparis which gives an indication of the asking price of old adverts which is definitely useful but in England I can actually look up what were the actual last registered price paid via Land Registry or websites that search it eg www.zoopla.co.uk.

Any advice from the more knowledgeable out there ? Thanks

Switzerland likes to keep things confidential.......

What you offering ???

Honestly, what was last paid for a property is irrelevant*, as the market has been so screwy these last 3 or so years. In some places prices have risen slowly, in others prices have rocketed up to stratospheric levels. It's all supply and demand these days, rather than fundamentals.

If you are thinking of using that info in negotiations, tread carefully.

Good luck.




*Unless of course you are buying under the BGBB or similar, where prices are controlled.

Some of these comments are really useless...

Anyway...

If you have the grundbuchauszug (extract of land registry book) of the propertery you can find the tax value. From the tax value you can figure out what was paid for the property because in many (all?) cantons, the tax authority just substracts 20% to the price paid to determine the tax value. So if the grundbuchauszug states a 2008 tax value of 800'000, then you can assume that the house was bought in 2008 for 1 million. The grundbuchauszug is part of the standard documents that the realestate agents give out when they try to sell a property so it's very easy to obtain for free.

I don't think past pricing knowledge is irrelevant. In most cases there are similar properties in the location that may have soldmore recently and this information combined with relative position , condition and M2 can then given a current indication of what the market MIGHT be. It does not indicate fact but it all helps. Thanks for the useful info so far.

It is certainly not irrelevant but I see you are British (as I am) and I would say that the valuing of properties in function of similar properties and recent sales (as is standard in the UK) is only a very small part of how properties are formally valued here in CH.

Of course the market value is however much anyone is prepared to actually pay (not much use when you are trying to establish a price), but the formal valuation process employed here (about which I have a lot of criticisms but that is for anther time) is important if your buyer has a mortgage up to 80%. Larger down payments will mean the bank is not so interested in the price being actually paid.

Since a huge no of people build new houses on Land they bought this will not work very well.
I have known modern houses that were valued & cost to build 30% more than the seller was asking 5 years later.

What something cost is irrevivent in a non liguid market.

For a specific property, or for properties in a given Gemeinde? If the latter, have a look at http://www.statistik.zh.ch/internet/...ienpreise.html (data for communities with low numbers of properties sold should be handled with care)

Certainly here the 'estimation cadastrale' can be way off the price paid.

Knowing what was paid for a piece of property also gives you an indication of where the "rock-bottom" might be for negotiation (people usually don't expect to lose money on property). In a normal market, that is - I expect in Switzerland it's not likely to be useful to you at all, but good luck!

Unless a person paid too much for the property in the first place ..

The Swiss market is too small, too varied and too unrepresentative for any concrete rules to emerge regarding comparative pricing.

Truly, it's a minefield out there. We have just sold our proeprty and to fix the price, we worked out what we comfortably needed to move on and got that. We checked it was reasonable in function of other factors (comparable properties .. practically none, formal valuation - gave us a 100,000 Chf spread .. useless, adding up how much had been spent on the house (not on maintenance just capital works .. it is a relatively new house) crazy but amazingly quite a frequently used tool in a market where private sellers are the norm).

So definitely do your homework by getting a feel for prices in the area but do not put any great store on them in valuation terms.

The Swiss have lost money over the last 20 years on property. Prices today are about back to the 1990 prices.
As a new house depreciates, unless prices are rising you would expect to loose money on a new build over time, why buy a 10 year old house if you can build a new one for the same price?

Because the gardens of old houses are usually larger.

Not really the case in CH, you buy & pay for building land by the m2, you choose the size of the plot, it depends on how much money you want to pay for your garden.

That may be true in the UK however in London many 30 year old houses get knocked down & get replaced with houses of 3 times the size. The land is where the value is not the house on the land.

Is that true????

Sure. It's just that new plots of the size that was normal 30 years ago are hardly on offer nowadays.

You just buy 2 plots & build 1 house. Properties are valued here by land value plus house, in many cases an old house in the middle of a big plot will have a negative value.

Generally houses have small gardens as people build the biggest house on the plot of land, because they don't want to pay an extra 500k for the garden. Of course in the sticks you can buy plots of 2000m where 600m is building land & 1400m is farm land at 7CHF a m2 if your lucky.

Whether the person paid too much for the market may or may not have anything to do with their willingness to lose money on it. In my experience (limited in the arena of property, so take it with a grain of salt), Swiss tend to be rather rigid in pricing - and I would expect many people here to hang on to a property for a long time rather than accept a low offer just to dump it.

Hence the disclaimer for the Swiss market.

Which is usually ruled out by local regulations.

Ist there any place in the world where this is not the case?