Hi - I'm sorry if this question's already been asked.......but are the prices asked for houses set in stone (no pun intended!) or is it possible to put in a lower offer?

Thanks. Shona

We put in a lower house offer - in fact everyone I know who has bought a house has negotiated. Beware also that you may find that you are willing to pay a price, but the banks may say the property is overpriced and will not give a full mortgage. Do also shop around at the banks their offers vary by large amounts. Good luck if you are buying

It's perfectly acceptable to negotiate but you will find some sellers out there who are absolutely fixed and won't sell for less than the asking price.

I would say that typically the room for negotiation is less in Switzerland than in the UK.

There have been a number of properties on Homegate that dropped their prices when they didn't sell...

Thanks for your replies.
I live in Aberdeen, Scotland.......and I know nothing about negotiating lower prices! Here it's a case of how many TWENTIES of thousands do I go ABOVE the asking price to get the house I'm after. Very scarey. So it's quite nice to hear that you can try and go for a lower price. Hopefully the time that my fiance and I are going to be looking, probably within the next couple of months, might be a good time to pick up a bargain. I.e. if anyone is trying to sell just now they're going to be getting desperate........ (Or is that the canny Scot in me coming out?)

Buying a house here is nothing like the "offers over" buyers nightmare in Scotland. The trick here, we found, was to get the house you are interested in valued by the bank where you are getting your mortgage & use that price to negociate with.

Thanks for that advice....sounds like a great idea. My fiance's coming over in a month so hopefully he'll get right on to finding somewhere, that's if he doesn't spend every night down at Pickwicks with his new b/fs that he's met on here!

Obviously it also depends whether there are many other potential buyers, something we will never know. Our experience was that we had to compete to get our house.

I concur with this. We had to bid for our house, so it went above the asking price. The "good" properties rarely become available on the open market. Best advice is to get cosey with a couple of agents and make sure they know you have all the finance etc. In that way, it's also in their interest to get you a place.

Buying houses is like buying anything else, I ve always found that if I start really low I will get the reaction from the seller immediately, if its fair to middling I will stick to my guns, if he pulls a gun then I will start negotiating up..

One word of advice (or sentence) ' Its much easier to go up in price when buying than to pull it down..

....... and then only if the current owner deems you worthy of their property.

I always ask the Agent how long the property had been on the market. If is has been over six months then I think it is very likely the owner will accept a pretty heavy discount, certainly10%+.

My experience in Switzerland is that is not always the case. Often the house stays on the market as the owner will only sell if s/he gets their asking price. I've seen house go off the market instead of being sold at a "discount". The Swiss market is rather idiosyncratic!

The trend in house prices in Switzerland in the last 20 years has been an increase of 1.5%. If you offer less than the asking price then it could easily be possible that whilst the owner may have been living there for twenty years, they could actually be making a loss in accepting a lower price. Perhaps this is why lots decline nd take their houses off the market.

We want to buy but can't think of many good reasons to do so, even if we planned to live in the house for ten years. This would be when compared with investing the deposit money elsewhere and renting. Can anyone provide any reasons for buying (near Zurich) rather than renting? We need to make up our minds on a property in the next few days (it's a new build). Ultimately we'll make up our own minds but at times it's difficult to separate the emotional side of things with the hard facts.

1.) Our mortgage payments plus Eigenmietewert are considerably less than what we were paying in rent. The savings far outweighs what we might have earned investing the down payment.

2.) No evil landlord.

3.) I can do the laundry at 2 AM. Or anything else I damn well please.

While it was a sound financial decision for us, quality of life issues were the real reason we chose to buy.

Hello,

I intend to buy an apartment near Baden , Does it make sense to buy and Old apartment which has been refurbished in comparision to a Brand New Apartment , I find that for the same size of house the price differential is quiet a lot



Regards

We bought a new apartment in a small village near Baden. Before we decide on the apartment we did a lot of comparison shopping around the area (we also live in Nussbaumen). However... my general feeling is that the pricing differences is mostly attributed to the location. The age of the property does come into play a little bit.... however we found that in areas with high demand, the age of property does not really affect the asking price all that much. And some of the older properties we saw.... after factoring in the anticipated costs for renovation and upgrade... it will generally be almost on par with the new properties.

Another advantage we found with new construction... in addition to that many of them now are built with modern standards, which means much better insulation and low-cost heating technologies, is that we really have the freedom to choose the interior finishes exactly to our specifications.

I could probably go on and on... hope this helps a little bit. If you like to discuss a little further.. feel free to PM me and I'd be more than happy to share our experience.

A lot of landlords can hang on, the above is only true when the seller becomes desperate, that's what you need to find out and armed with this you can certainly try and negotiate.

The location of the apartment is the issue. Some areas are more attractive than others, so buying a new apartment in an area with difficult resale value may make less sense than buying an older one in a better location.

If you buy a renovated apartment, if the entire building has not been renovated, you may find your heating costs are no different than your neighbours even if you have new windows, for example. The reason for this is that some old heating systems calculate heating costs based on the square metres, not actual usage. So do check if the entire building and all the units have been updated.

With the interest rates as low as they are, it really does make sense to get out of the rent trap if you plan to stay here long term.

One thing to note here is that many properties are sold privately, rather than with an agent.

Good luck with your search.