Faced with high rents, Swiss families are leaving big cities to settle in urban areas. Investors also see opportunities there, notes a UBS study.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, many more households have left the centers for other Swiss municipalities than in previous years, underlines UBS in a real estate study on Tuesday. The country’s five major centers recorded an internal departure of around 15,000 people per year between 2020 and 2022, the highest in the last 40 years. In Zurich, Bern and Geneva, annual net departures were three to four times more numerous than in the previous ten years.
For these families, it is a question of making substantial savings, especially since the rise of teleworking has made it easier to move away from offices. In 2023, rents offered within a ten-minute travel radius were on average 16% lower than in the city center, compared to 11% ten years earlier.
Around Zurich, the commuter is king
The gap between rents is particularly marked in the Zurich region, where commuting is most profitable. Less than ten minutes by car from the city bordered by the Limmat, the rents offered are on average 20% cheaper than in the center. The drop reaches a third from 20 minutes of travel. An hour’s journey away, rents cost half as much.
Between 2020 and 2022, more than 1,000 people moved from Zurich to Schlieren and Dübendorf, two municipalities located less than a quarter of an hour’s drive from the center and which have significantly expanded their housing stock in recent years.
The Genevans heading to Lancy
In French-speaking Switzerland, nearly a thousand people left Geneva for Lancy where rents were 16% lower in 2022. The figures reach 766 people for Vernier (-21%) and 640 for Thônex (-15%).
This difference is less clear in Lausanne and Basel, where for a 20-minute journey, rents in nearby municipalities fall by 5% and 11% respectively. The Vaudois city was even shunned by 900 people who moved to Pully, on the banks of Lake Geneva, where prices were 10% higher.
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