Does anyone have any experiences in this regard? Difficult/impossible?

I would love to buy a plot of land and build on it one day. Maybe just a dream...

hello Breezy

We as specialists in building could help you choosing the right plot for you. To make sure you could build on there without difficulties.

So why dont you PM us when you found a plot and ask us to have a look at it, and tell you what we think about it.

With kind regards

The allrounder team

Hello The allrounder team,

Thanks for your response. My questions are quite basic at the moment and it would be good to keep the discussion public for the benefit of everyone. If I get to the stage of finding and purchasing, I will contact you - I hope I get to that stage (depends on the price of land I suspect...)

I'm looking around lake Zurich towards the kanton Schwyz end. I actually am interested in having a Huf House built after seeing a programme with one in it. http://www.huf-haus.com/gb/intro.html Just love the look of them.

At the moment I am looking at the generic housing websites - homegate/immopool etc - to do my research. Are there other places that I should look? Is there an indicative price per sq m? Are there restrictions for non locals? I am a C permit resident so I imagine that helps.

On a side note, I actually know someone from back home in England (she is Swiss) who owns a little bit of land right on the lake and I dont think it has ever gone on the market - was thinking of making her an offer. The plot is small, but I think I could probably get a dinky house on it.

That is it at the moment, a bit of a dream. Would be great to hear from anyone who has actually bought land and built on it.

Contact Huf Haus direct they will help you with finding a suitable plot of land and of course the build itself along with all the money aspects.

I know land is classified by the germeinde as residential or agricultural (there may be others like industrial as well I suppose) and you cannot build on agricultural land at all apart from farm buildings, and even then the restrictions are quite severe.

My GF bought our place a few years ago, at first she could only buy the house and plot it was built on. She wanted the one hectare of agricultural that went with it for her horses and she could only buy that once she had presented a "business" plan to the gemeinde to show that she would use it for agricultural purposes (horse breeding and growing apple trees) and had the required expertise to look after the land.

You might want to consider buying an existing house in bad repair, demolishing and building your new house on the plot. You may find plots of empty residential land harder to come by.

Good luck either way!

I got a house here that needed nothing except cleaning the carpets and sanding the wooden floors. The company that did the one room with carpet in the basement managed to break the heating thermostat control, and the floor sanders put some tape to block off where we shouldn't step and it fell on the floor and stuck to the varnish Replacing a window a few years later left the corner of the wall damaged too. I'm on my 5th house with renovations along the way and would be my personal nighmare to go through the worry of building a house.

A few people in my family have had the dream of building houses back in Australia. My grandparents ended up with a very narrow staircase that you can't get furniture through, my sister in law has a balcony with sea views that is so wobbly she can't use, my other sister in law turned up one day to find the place where the front door was supposed to be bricked over, and my father is in the middle of repairs problems from his new build last year.

For any building project you really need someone to manage the builders every day and check on things. Unless you are just around the corner, you can't be the person to check up on things and you may not have the skills to know what is getting done wrong. Friends nearby here had the builders forget the damp proof course for the front wall of their house. The wall started getting mouldy their first winter there and they are having trouble getting the builder to fix it under warranty.

I couldn't agree more. We've never done had a really big job done but even with our kitchen renovation there were a couple of things which would have been really infuriating afterwards had I not been on hand to see what the workers were doing.

Friends of ours who had a house built had a long-going battle with the builders until all the problems were sorted out. They constantly had water on the garage floor. Only after they had make a terrific fuss was it discovered that the pipe from the 'drain' in a garage wasn't connected to anything. Though the builders swore blind they had flushed the pipe through. The circuit breaker tripped (or whatever it does which switches the current off) every time the lady of the house pressed the switch to close the blinds. (She was informed that she was pressing the switch incorrectly!!!) Even comparatively small things like these may mean digging up the floor or making holes in the newly decorated walls quite apart from the constant hassle until the question of 'who is responsible' is resolved.

If you want to fulfill your dream, keep your head out of the clouds.

Okay - building a house from scratch or even doing major renovations is going to bring frustrations and headaches. It's inevitable, unless you're very lucky. And teething problems are common afterwards. I've done both a new build and a big renovation job and my experiences weren't that bad. It took longer than we planned, cost more than we planned and for a while after we moved in we had a steady stream of workmen coming back to fix this and that - most of them niggles but they take to fix and it's inconvenient. But come back they did - and they did the work under guarantee. I agree with the comments about getting the design right - especially on a new build. It's very hard to visualize space off a plan and very easy to make mistakes like the staircase that was too narrow. And you definitely will need someone to supervise the builders otherwise planning and quality control can go seriously off piste. There's a big difference buying a new build "off the peg" from a builder doing a small development of new houses and doing something yourself as an individual project. But the upside is that within reason, you get to build what you want or at least customise your home to suit you, and once the hassle is over that's worth a lot, at least to me. So I wouldn't say forget the dream. Just go into the process with your eyes open.

As GG mentions, you really need to understand the restrictions (purchasing, zoning, building, etc.) relevant to the property - and when you think you have it all figured out, ask again. And again.

I have been searching for a rural/farm property in SZ for years now. The problem is that I am not considered a farmer, and the bulk of land that interests me is held in bauerliche Bodenrecht - a very complex bit of law designed to keep agricultural land in the hands of family farms. Even if the owner wants to sell to me, the law will not allow it.

(The irony is that I do indeed want to be a small farmer, old broken collies being my crop of choice... What I want to do would preserve the landscape and traditions of the area. Instead, whenever a piece of land is re-zoned for sale to non-farmers, it seems to have already been earmarked for big developers who then squeeze in as many ugly concrete boxes as possible. But I digress... )

But assuming you find a property zoned for building - you need to understand restrictions at both the Gemeinde and at the cantonal level.

To give you and idea, we recently found a 2 hectare property, one with an existing farmhouse, woods, and a stream running through it. Perfect, no?

But even though the entire parcel was listed (and priced !) as Bauland, we learned that the existing house was actually outside today's Bauzone - the owner had grandfathered permission, but that permission would expire with him - a new owner would have to move the house. OK, but 2 hectares is a lot of land, surely rebuilding would be no problem, right? By the time we had all the cantonal and Gemeinde set-backs figured out, as well as the Naturschutz restrictions - of that 2 hectares, about 200qm were actually buildable. And that 200qm was the one spot one would not want a house. And then there were the building dimension restrictions...

I had to do a lot of detective work to figure all this out. Property purchasing is very much caveat emptor. In the end, we decided that particular property was simply not worth the asking price.

It can get to be a very complicated process. Just make sure you know exactly what you are getting into.

Best of luck with your project!

You might find the following blog helpful written by an English guy who built a Huf Haus near Zürich.

http://huf-haus.blogspot.com/

Still I would like to hear how to find a plot of land or an old house for demolition.

I see the responses about the management of building the house and thanks for your inputs. The beauty of the Huf Haus projects is that they are built to high standards and will be put up within a week of building commencement!! The one on the programme was actually built in 4 days!! A bonus is that the price is fixed - although it is of course not cheap. It does however give you certainty. It is prefabricated, which sounds grim, but it really is not. In my opinion, they are quite beautiful. If you want evidence, here is the link to the programme I watched:

http://www.channel4.com/4homes/on-tv...06-04_p_1.html

For me, this takes the headache of all the project management - I have no building skills and just want the end product. It doesnt look massively different to the price of an existing appartment. I take note of the issues relating to the various gemeinde / federal rules on building regulations and will be careful to monitor that, but I think the experts will be able to give guidance.

From the posts that have been given below - it seems most sense to contact them directly - they have an office near Zurich after all. So I will head down that route.

Also checkout this blog by an expat who recently built a huf-haus near Geneva. I can also bring you in contact with him if that's interesting for you.

If you decide to build a house from scratch, I would really recommend NOT to take a prefab option like HufHaus or any other.
The main point of building from scratch is building what YOU want, how you would like to use it, and with respect to the surroundings on the plot that you choose to purchase (for its qualities - existing trees, views, etc.)

Putting a house from a catalog on any land is sacrilege, IMHO. The individual approach is dying out, we will soon be living in standardized boxes, all the same.

For the same price of prefab, which can be quite expensive sometimes, you can have an individual approach and YOUR own project. It may take more time, sometimes it is more difficult to get a building permit if the house is of an unusual shape, but it will be as you want it.

I know a lot of people have bad experience with architect. I had an awful experience myself - architect tried to steal on big scale from us, we had major technical problems (neighboring house started to slip downhill), we had to fire architect and we are still in court with him, 3 years later. I had to manage a building site completely myself for 2 years.

I learned a lot and now I have founded an architectural office, in partnership with a Swiss architect with 25 years of experience. Now we are trying to make our projects as interesting and as individual as possible. We are not claiming to change the world, but we are doing it one project at a time.

Wishing you best of luck in your nest-building adventure!

Salut Brezzy
If I was you, I would look for a region, where I would like to live and then make a list of the towns and villages in this region.
The next step would be to make a visit to the building office of each place.
The "Gemeinde" have a plan of all building land and the name of the land owner. They could also say if there was land free in "Baurecht" (You build for 99 years on rented land).
Land outside of the "Bauzone" you can forget, unless you have a lot of time (10 years at least) and money.

Salut Zamma

Breezy, I don't know anything about Huf houses but your post piqued my interest. A quick google shows that the process is not always as seamless as you expect. I'm sure the product is an excellent one but just reading the blogs etc it seems they're not immune to snags and defects, extra costs can occur and it seems Huf after sales care is not always as responsive as you might want once you've signed the contract and/or coughed up the dosh. Nothing unusual in that and no reason not to buy a Huf. But all I can tell you is that even though it's a prefab, it's still a building from scratch and having done one, I doubt even Huf can guarantee a completely headache free experience. Any individual building project is a major commitment, on your time if nothing else. Be warned

I have found a block on land which I would like to investigate and see what are the possibility, its an empty slot in a built up area, the obvious question is why is it still empty? How does one find out who owns it and the conditions for this land, do you just call the local Gemeinde?

Be sure to read the Justice Department's explanation of the Lex Koller:
http://snurl.com/lex-e (English)
http://snurl.com/lex-d (German)
http://snurl.com/lex-f (French)