Swiss real estate market – turnaround in interest rates, so what?
The Swiss home market is completely unimpressed by the turnaround in interest rates. The continued extremely low supply has ensured that prices for longer-term mortgages have continued to rise even after the rise in interest rates. Single-family homes rose in price by 1.3 percent in the second quarter of 2022. Price dynamics were even stronger for condominiums, which recorded a price increase of 3.5 percent. The rise in interest rates has had an impact on the choice of financing product when buying a home or extending an expiring mortgage. SARON mortgages, which remain cheap, are currently in greater demand than ever before. «Even over the long term, the money market mortgage was the cheapest form of financing in the past. Compared to 10-year fixed-rate mortgages, the savings since 1988 have been around a third,” explains Martin Neff, Chief Economist at Raiffeisen Switzerland.
After years of oversupply, the signs on the rental housing market are now clearly pointing to a shortage. Although demand will continue to exceed the supply of housing in the future, the real estate industry has so far not reacted with higher housing production. As long as rents do not rise sharply, there will be no incentive to expand residential construction in the current market environment. “The remaining vacancy reserves will soon be exhausted. Because the demand from immigration, individualization and demographic aging continues to increase,
while at the same time fewer and fewer new homes are being built. Significant increases in asking rents are therefore only a matter of time and the topic will move up the political agenda,” says Neff.
Densification progresses slowly
It's getting tighter and tighter in Switzerland. The new buildings in this country are getting taller, the apartments in them are getting smaller and more and more people live in the residential zones. So the scarce land is being used more and more economically. However, because land use per person continues to rise and more and more people are living in Switzerland, the pace of densification is far from sufficient to stop urban sprawl. “High hurdles stand in the way of the faster densification demanded by spatial planning. The construction costs of projects with higher density are significantly higher than for a new building on a green field. In addition, strict, inflexible and inconsistent building and zoning regulations limit, complicate or make densification efforts impossible. A very liberal objection practice increases the planning effort for projects with high consolidation potential and leads to ever greater administrative effort," says Martin Neff. For example, the average time from the submission of a building application to the granting of a building permit for buildings with more than three apartments has increased significantly in the last 20 years from 92 days to 150 days.
Bursting bubbles in the virtual world
Trading in digital assets based on blockchain technology has experienced a real hype in the course of the cryptocurrency boom. In the meantime, land and real estate can also be purchased in the digital world, the so-called metaverse. The more attractive a piece of digital soil is, the more people will pay for it. The relative attractiveness is strongly defined by how many players are in the vicinity of the property on average. The market for digital real estate has experienced enormous price increases. At the beginning of January 2021, for example, in one of the best-known Mataverses "The Sandbox", the average plot of land was still being traded for less than 150 US dollars. By the end of the year, the price had risen to over $16,000, an increase in value of almost 11,000 percent. By the end of June 2022, prices had collapsed to $2,500. Such a bubble formation with subsequent bursting has been observed in many Metaverse projects in recent months. Among other things, this is favored by the fact that many projects are tied to cryptocurrencies for technical reasons, the future of which cannot yet be estimated either. "Due to the extreme volatility, the obvious tendency to bubble and the questionable intentions of many providers, virtual real estate remains primarily a playing field for speculators who are very willing to take risks," says Martin Neff.
The “Immobilien Schweiz” study offers a detailed quarterly assessment of the Swiss real estate market. The current study and further information are available at raiffeisen.ch/casa.