Hello
My fiancee and I are looking for a house to buy in Switzerland.

And wondering if any of you here had experience in buying a property in Switzerland whether, renovation, or buying a new built or buying a land and build on it. What are the pros and cons?
Would be great to hear tips and what to watch out for

Best wishes,
MyLan

Lots of good threads on this exact topic.

Enter the words "buy a house" in the search function and a whole list will show up.

Here's one of the latest:

https://www.englishforum.ch/showthread.php?t=302402

Some recent thread:
General property buying question(s)
Questions To Ask Realtor When Viewing a House
Another thread about buying a house
Maintaining small house & living in the lower mountains questions
Would you buy a property constructed on a Landfill site?
Grundstückgewinnsteuer does it apply to flats and houses

Some interesting searches:
http://www.englishforum.ch/search2.php?q=buy+house
http://www.englishforum.ch/search2.php?q=estate
https://www.englishforum.ch/search2.php?q=mortgage
https://www.englishforum.ch/search2.php?q=property
(Also have a look at the older threads. Not much changes in the history and politics of Switzerland.)

Tip: If you change https to http, the forum software will make nice named links

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Thank you this is really very helpful.
Will check this out.

We are also looking like what to do first, do we talk to the seller already if we found something but have so many questions about it or do we go to the bank for advise. We are also not sure how it works, as we are not yet married. And if we decide later after buying a house or before. Also what are the tax implications?
But thank you for the links. Will check this out

Hello,

we just bought and we are not married. This is not an issue.
We are both from EU, working and have B permit

We went to the bank only when we had a concrete example to let them analyze our situation and the property
Of course we did some homework beforehand so that we are not completely in the dark

Banks are quite good at explain you the mechanisms and costs

I recommend going to talk with 2 ore more bank
This will do wonders if you plan on reducing interest rate by a substantial amount

We approached the bank first, the manager explained us the process end to end. The process slightly varies if it's a new construction and the move is only in the future.

I suggest you approach a bank (atlest 2), they will help you with the knowledge. Also you can do a little bit reading before your visit.

once you understood the process and finalised the object, then you can also look at the below links, if you prefer to apply mortgage online.

https://www.moneyland.ch/de/kredite-hypotheken

https://key4.ch/en/

With properties changing hands so quickly here (or at least that's my assumption), it's probably smarter to first get in touch with the bank(s) to see whether you can get a mortgage, how much, against which price, etc.

Does anyone have experience with neubauprojekte.ch? I find it difficult to find a property around ZH... if they’re good they sell incredibly fast and the new builds are already 1/2 sold by the time they reach comparis and homegate.

I have tried getting in contact directly with the real estate agencies as well, but it’s a sellers’ market and they know they will sell fast so they don’t bother with dealing with buyers anymore.

Any REAL feedback? Is it worth paying 200 CHF for the info?

They'll also offer coffee .

We used this service to get the lowest interest rate (they do the shopping around for you). Turns out the lowest rate they found for us was from an insurance company, not a bank.

https://moneypark.ch/en/

We also used Moneypark. They were ok. We got a 0.9% for 6 years. They did a lot of the donkey work. Cost about CHF 450 for the service (half-price through our Neon bank account). I dare say we could have sourced a lower rate but Valiant bank have so far been excellent & we wanted to find finance quickly for a new build.

Of course this consideration may be invalid because there are so many factors to consider but i have 2 examples of 2 mortgages from friends

1. around 500k property
2. around 1M property

Both got offers from UBS and CreditSuisse for interests of 0.65 - 0.75 for 3, 5, 7 and 10 years. This was 3-4 months ago

Unfortunately the very slight uptick in Swiss interest rates end of last year/beginning of this pushed ours up slightly from rates you mentioned, hence ours averages at 0.9 rather than hoped-for 0.7. I think Credit Suisse was lower than 0.9 too, but for assorted reasons we went with Valiant. Anyone that meets relevant criteria and is prepared to put the legwork in should get a slightly better rate than ours.

I can‘t grumble at what we have, however. Rates remain incredibly cheap, though goodness knows where they‘ll be in 6 months - or more importantly for us, 6 years...

YMMV, but I found them pretty poor. They were not able to find anything better than what I found and what they did find was very uncompetitive.

had the same experience