Two-thirds live on rent in Switzerland

As the Federal Statistical Office announced on Thursday (BFS), 1.4 million households lived in the home. More than half of the 730,000 households owned a detached house. Nearly a third, or 450,000 households, belonged to people over the age of 65.

On the tenant side, the average four-room apartment under two years old was 20 percent more expensive than older ones. Also, the longer a household lived in an apartment, the cheaper the rents became. This influence intensified after a ten-year lease period. They paid an average of 2,112 francs for a new four-room apartment. An old apartment of the same size costs 1,700 francs a month.

Rental apartments are heated more often with district heating

While 71 percent of the rental apartments are heated with heating oil and natural gas, this is the case in only 59 percent of the apartments. FSO attributes this to the fact that tenants live in large buildings mostly equipped with oil and gas boilers.

Due to the spatial distribution, rental apartments are more often connected to central heating systems than owner-occupied apartments. On the other hand, 22 percent of owner-occupied apartments are equipped with heat pumps more often than rental apartments (11 percent).

Almost half of them are privately owned

In 2022, almost half (47 percent) of rental apartments were privately owned. 45 percent of small one- or two-room rentals were privately owned, while more than 60 percent of larger ones with more than five rooms were owned.

Two-thirds (67 percent) of apartments built before 1946 were privately owned. This rate was only 35 percent for the houses built after 2000. Nationwide, the canton of Geneva had the lowest proportion of privately owned rental apartments at 27 percent, while Valais and Ticino each had the highest at 69 percent. (SDA)

Source :Blick