Rental housing market remains lively
More than 500,000 apartments were advertised on the housing market between October 2020 and September 2021. More apartments were advertised in ten cantons than in the comparison period before the pandemic. At the same time, the average time on market decreased in 15 of the 26 cantons.
Between October 2020 and September this year, a total of 500,084 rental apartments were advertised on Swiss real estate portals, SVIT Switzerland informs in a message on the current online housing index ( OWI ). It is prepared every six months by the Association of the Real Estate Industry in cooperation with the Swiss Real Estate Institute of the Zurich School of Economics ( HWZ ).
Compared to the comparison period shortly before the pandemic (October 2018 to September 2019), the number of advertisements has increased by around 40,000 or 8 percent, explain the analysts from SVIT and HWZ. Despite the temporary "extraordinary frictions" in the wake of the pandemic, the rental housing market remains "very lively".
The average time from the launch of the advertisement to the rental of the apartment has decreased by one to 33 days compared to the same period, the message said. The analysts from SVIT and HWZ observed different developments in the individual regions.
15 out of 26 cantons showed a decline in advertising times. These were the clearest, with values between ten and 14 days, in the rural German-speaking cantons of Uri, Graubünden and Bern, according to the announcement. In the cantons of western Switzerland, however, the advertising time was consistently longer than in the reference period. The analysts observed increasing numbers of advertisements in ten, while decreasing numbers in 16 cantons.
In the announcement, the analysts also deal with a shift in demand on the rental apartment market in cities. Compared to the same period of the previous year, 40 percent more one-room apartments and 8 percent fewer apartments with five or more rooms were offered. In this way, "the structural oversupply for large, expensive apartments and the structural surplus demand for small, inexpensive apartments" have been partially reduced.