During my months of searching, I saw many, many types of houses and flats on my search sites… but I also saw many neubau (new build) objects in the listings. I was a little wary of neubau because I’ve read some horror stories about them on forums, but at the same time I was attracted by the offers available.
Image via Erstbezug.ch
The Bad:
- Hidden costs snowballing
- Asshole contractors with red tape
- Delays
- Cannot secure a mortgage until later, interest might go up
The Good:
- First come, first serve: Minimal fighting to buy
- Custom changes, options galore
- More time to save for a bigger deposit
- Everything is NEW
A few people have vented their frustrations with neubau online, so I had a pretty clear idea what we might expect if we go this route. People complained about buying a flat for one price and then paying lots of money on changes and having the flat cost a lot more than they anticipated.
I also heard a lot of complaining about the entire process of working with contracting firms. Some horror stories had contractors pressuring clients for a lot more money before they would finish and others had extreme delays that put the buyer out of home after their move-in date was postponed.
To be honest, it did seem like neubau is a headache from what I heard. Lots of people warned others to just not try and deal with it. So why did we keep looking?
Choice. By choosing neubau, we could totally avoid the vicious bidding wars on houses and flats in Switzerland. There would be no first, second and third round of bidding. If you want a neubau flat it is relatively simple: pay a fee to reserve, sign a contract and start paying your deposit.
In essence, all we had to do was decide on a flat before someone else did. Then the flat would be ours, no questions asked.
In addition to avoiding the war on ownership, we could customize a flat to meet our own preferences and needs before it was built and when we move in, everything will be brand new. Buying something totally new was a major selling point for Kay, who didn’t want to feel like he was downgrading if we moved out of our comfortable flat in Zürich.
We also calculated that if we would have until the flat was done to save for our mortgage, we would be able to pay a significantly larger deposit and therefore we could buy a bit more expensive flat than we would have been able to at the beginning of 2012. The risk was that when our mortgage would start in 2013, the interest rates may go up.
Neubau still sounded right for us, so while I kept searching for potential existing houses, I started focussing more and more on neubau projects.
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