Can anyone recommend best areas to rent/buy a single family home with a yard/garden? Looking for a place within 40km of Roche main buildings.

Does one need to live in France or Germany to find such places?

Your work permit will probably require you live in Switzerland, unless your from an EU 17 country you probably wont get a cross border permit, also the taxes in France & Germany will be considerably higher.

Have been told that there is possibility of a waiver which would allow me to live in France or Germany. Also, wife is eligible for UK passport.

Can I buy a house in France or Switzerland? What kind of down payment is required? What are mortgage rates like?

Friends of us just found / rented a lovely place with garden in Möhlin (Aargau) , Close to the border, Close to Kaiseraugst and Town plants of Roche yet outside of town.

Close to the border for shoping ( Rheinfelden) and a trains to Basel too.

Other places within 15/25 minutes train/car from Basel/Kaisersaugst are :

* Mumpf
* Stein-Säckingen
* Eiken
* and last but not least Frick.

All these are on a direct connection train line to Basel , or directly accessible with the car.


Regarding buying a house, thats a personal choise and involves a good bit of research and work.
Check out the Forum search for more info, here is one to help you on the way :

[Ins and Outs] Buying Property in Switzerland

Be quick as houses with gardens here are rare to find for a reasonable price yet when you do, its lovely !

Happy Househunting

Joey

would it be crazy to live in Scherz and have to drive about 50km on the A3 into Basel for work? Only about 36 miles round-trip, which doesn't seem so bad.

I can only suggest to do a test drive when you are here.
When we hunted for a roof above our head, 30/35 miles didn't seem to bad also, all depending where it was located, was there only a landstrasse or also a highway etc.. It is hard to define " not to bad " as traffic jam's even happen in Switzerland

Its hard to say when you didn't do the run yourself to qualify it as " not to bad ".

The towns below in my previous post are handy enough, and as a bonus you have the option of taking the train.

Living up a hill is nice, but if the car doesn't want to start, its nice to have the train as a backup.

I have clients who live in Canton Aargau and work in Basel.

I suggest you visit Scherz before you even consider renting a house there, particularly if you have children who require local schooling.

Honestly? I personally think that would be a crazy idea. You would be driving through the Schweizerhalle tunnel daily at peak time and there are pretty much every day jams jams jams around that area.

If you want to drive I recommend living somewhere down the H18. You'll still have to face the daily "getting out of basel" jam (which can take an easy half hour to clear sometimes) but then you can slope off down the highway to the right while everyone else queues up for Schweizerhalle.

Most people in Switzerland don't commute very far to work - people would usually live within about 10kms of their working place - and there are so many nice areas a lot closer that I wouldn't consider somewhere so far away. I'm assuming you have a family if you're looking for a garden (?) if so then they would be much better off being close to the facilities of Basel - suburbs if you want space - but I wouldn't go so far as Scherz (why??)

Agree with Wattsli1.

While traffic jams in CH may be different to California, they do exist in particularly bad spots, and coming into Basel is one of them. You have all the traffic coming Northbound from most of Switzerland, as Basel sits on main motorway networks North to Germany and France and the rest of Northeastern Europe.

So, not only do you have commuter traffic, you also have through traffic to deal with, added to which the motorways around there are generally limited in speed so you can't really "by-pass" the city.

Unless you live on a public transport link, I would avoid driving into Basel from the South for a commute. That all said, different strokes for different folks. Some people think 30 mins is a long commute. Others that 1 hr is short.

Good luck with the move.

I've got a nice house with small garden 7km from Grenzacherstrasse. The further out you are, the cheaper houses become. However the difficulty in finding them doesn't vary too much. It took two years of searching before we got ours. I know plenty of people of varying nationalities who border commute. But I wouldn't recommend it if you have kids.

It is entirely possible to find houses on, or close to, the major public transport routes.

If you live too near to Roche however, you won't get an employee parking space. I heard that the rules just changed recently.

Our neighbor, and many others in our village, live in France and work in Basel (about 20 minutes down the highway). We moved here from the Chicago area and our kids enjoy living here. The French language tends to be easier to learn than high German and the cost of living is also much lower here.
leboncoin.fr is a good resource to find real estate listings in France.
Good luck.