I assume that RE agents and banks like it when prices go up. Would they really issue warnings?
Let’s imagine that prices in major cities start to decline, how would we learn about it?
I see same set of posts showing up for two years in a row. The seller is waiting for a naive buyer. That means we can’t use listings to judge where the market is.
Any ideas how to figure that out?
It has its flaws but the Federal Statistical Office computes an index: Property Prices | Federal Statistical Office
If the end goal is purchasing real estate on the cheap, making offers at a discount from the value at which we estimate the value of the asset until we score a good deal could do the trick. I recently bought a house in a small mountain village (not a resort) at 75% of the listed price (at what I consider to be the actual value of the asset, so no actual discount for me - initial offer was at 55% of the listed price). The same may not hold for highly desirable cities.
Edit to expend on that bit: If I were trying to buy real estate now, I’d make it so that I am under no time pressure, start with very low offers on a number of assets I am interested in and gradually step up my offers if no one bites (on other assets as to not incentivize the original seller trying to drive my price up), until sellers start biting. Whatever the price is that the transaction ends up occurring at (and I’d drive a hard bargain to keep it down) is by definition the market price of that asset at that specific time.
Hello Wolverine, could you please share how you formulated your offer? I suck at negotiations and hesitate to make an offer for a lower amount (how stupid is that). I literally have the financing ready (for a small apartment in the Berner Oberland) and hesitate how to write the email. Should I just write “Wir möchten gerne eine verbindliche Offerte für xxx CHF (inklusiv kkk) einreichen, angenommen dass die Konditionen in Ihrer Email vom xx.yy.zz gültig sind.” Or should I try to validate my lower offer? Actually, my validation is quite simple: Expected income / Price of the apartment should be more than 4.5%.
Some countries have rather detailed statistics on all transactions taking place in the real estate sector. Like Estonia, where obviously the land register is fully digital and hence compiling all transactions takes little to no effort beyond registering what transacted in a database.
And when you do, journalists, realtors and construction companies will tell you it’s a seasonal anomaly:
In January, the average price per square meter for apartments in Tallinn was 14 percent lower than in December, according to preliminary data from the Land Board. However, real estate companies believe this is not an indication of a larger downward trend but rather a seasonal peculiarity that does not affect the bigger picture.
No.
From time to time the SNB has issued warnings, the last quote I could find was from March 2023. SNB also have to be careful what they say
On a national level, Raiffeisen issue a quarterly study at national level showing KPIs like average time a property is listed etc. The spin on their analysis might be positive but the data should be the data
National data is pretty useless. We are able to see sold prices of individual properties in our neighborhood in the registre foncier (land registry). I think this may depend on the canton or even commune.
Some actually might:
I don’t see any warning in the UBS report.
UBS is actually too positive for my taste: rates will go down, index is lower, …
Thanks for the comments.
In the past they at times stated that the market is in bubble territory. Now they find it merely ‚overvalued‘. Does it mean it is bound to drop imminently? Not necessarily… with the population predicted to reach 9 million this year.