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Tricky Swiss Realty Ads

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As an expat in Switzerland, navigating the realty here can be intimidating in the beginning. It is easy to feel confused when searching through listings in German.

After living here for several years and searching for both rentals and houses for sale, I have noticed a couple points about the listing titles. Here are a few rough translations to explain.

This means that the apartment is really pretty small, but supposedly “nice”. Often you can find nice little luxury apartments or well kept spaces, but in general “Klein aber fein” means overpriced for how small it is.

I would definitely use this term to describe our $3000 a month one bedroom. It was beautiful and well-equipped and the view and luxury are worth it to some, but in our case I was ready to move on.

This generally means the house is in poor or terrible condition, but you can renovate it if you have the stomach for Swiss labor costs.

They are not always awful and sometimes you can find a great deal on a nice forever house, but most of the time they are so outdated or in bad repair that you wonder how people live in them.

Once I saw a house with a bathroom (bathtub and toilet) in the kitchen – a throwback to the olden days when the kitchen was the only room in the house with water pipes. But I don’t need a toilet in my food prep space, thank you.

Kay didn’t want to look at anything with Ausbaupotential because we were not planning on getting involved with any renovation projects at the moment. Or maybe ever. I don’t see Kay ever being that keen on self renovation or an old house.

This basically means that the place is overpriced and probably not affordable for you. Unless you happen to earn over a million a year or have several millions saved up in your account for the deposit, just look away.

Don’t spend too much time ogling luxury villas like I do.

Unlike “Toplage” listings, it’s usually a good thing when a listing is right on top of a public transportation stop. You will pay more money to be next to a train station. Prices go down if you are only next to a tram, even less for buses and if the listing requires a car to get to and from work, it had better be darn well cheap!

Those are just a few of the common listing terms I saw when I was searching to buy our home. If you are looking up rentals you need to watch out for three important things:

  1. “möblierte” apartments are furnished. Watch out if you are not looking for a furnished flat. There are plenty of them around.
  2. “WG” which stands for “Wohngemeinschaft” and means a shared flat. If you found a great price (1200CHF) on a four bedroom in downtown Zürich, it probably means that is the price for one of the rooms, not the whole flat.
  3. “Befristet” apartments. Chances are that flat is a great price because it is either being subleased for a limited period or it is due for a renovation. Either way, the leases on temporary apartments are usually 1-11 months. That can be good if you are looking for a temporary solution, but don’t fall in love and move into a flat that you’ll have to move out of in a couple months.

Do you notice any common listing terms on the realty around you?

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Neubau Progress: VII

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I was really worried that after January, we wouldn’t be able to see our flat again until it finished in May, but in February, Kay visited the flat for an appointment with the tile guys in the bathroom.

He noticed that in addition to the big hole we found in the kitchen, they had also drilled further into the hole outside the kitchen door. Not impressed.

Kay met with the tile guys and told them which direction we wanted the tiles to go. We also decided that since they fit perfectly on the ledge, we would use the black floor tiles on the bathroom ledge above the sink as well.

Kay sent me pictures of how the tiles would be direction-wise and he explained to me that they would be setup subway style as opposed to straight grid lines.

Kay also asked me on the phone if I was really sure I wanted white grouting on the walls, because it would cost more. Yep. I want white, white, white so I can see any dirt or grout on my bathroom walls. I think we can spare the minimal cost of upgrading here.

We also specified that we wanted the darkest grout available for the floor to match the floor tiles. My mother always had a hard time keeping the light grout in her kitchen tiles clean so I definitely didn’t want that to be an issue for us.

The rest of the flat was still kind of a crazy mess. Since they drilled the utility shaft so late, everything was a bit behind in the kitchen installation. We were also exchanging our steamer to upgrade some more, at a special, extra additional cost on us… but whatever. I was going to get my temperature controls!

Kay also snapped a photo of our curtain rails.

Small details like this are something that the company sort of glossed over, but I would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if we have to pay to install something ourselves or if it comes standard with the flat. I was happy to see them installed.

As you can see, they are the standard double curtain rail in Switzerland. We don’t normally have fancy curtain rods, but instead these minimalistic flush curtain rails with a track for sheer privacy curtains and another for heavier blackout curtains.

Our fuse box was still a hot mess.

Here they’d already marked on the floor which direction the tiles would be laid.

And since he was there, Kay went down to the floor below ours and checked our our kitchen hole from below.

Argh, just what are they doing in the kitchen?

I think this is the flat below ours where you can see they unfortunately had already installed the kitchen cabinets when they realized they’d forgotten the utility shaft.

Well well, no point stressing when there’s nothing we can do. We just had to wait and hope they patch it all up correctly… At least our tiles will be the right color and grouting after asking three times and going to this appointment!

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Neubau Progress: Changing Doors

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While our Rohbau phase of building was done, or as our contract manager liked to think… SET IN STONE… we did want to make some intelligent tweaks regarding doors…

Remember what our floor plan looks like?

If you notice up there, in the “Reduit”, the door opens into the pantry closet. Now, I think you all agree that it doesn’t make sense to open a closet door into the closet and lose all that extremely valuable storage space. We had to change that.

But worse was in the kitchen. Because the kitchen was almost closed off without a door, we decided to keep the door option so that we would be able to totally shut off the sights and smells from dinner guests and sleeping spouses. But as the company had it planned, the kitchen door would open and partially block the windows if you left it open, which we plan to.

Well, that didn’t make any sense… so we put in our door requests and below you can see the slightly amended “new plan”.

Now we won’t have to worry about getting into the pantry and our kitchen door will spend most of its life sitting flush against the entry wall in the apartment. We just had to make sure they actually put our door frames in the correct direction!

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We have a mortgage!

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By the time March rolled around, we decided it was time to figure out our mortgage once and for all. Our list of places that work with Americans despite FATCA requirements had grown smaller compared to last year, so we only had 4 banks to choose from compared to the 30+ that most Swiss have available to them.

Still, Kay went to all of them (ZKB, UBS, CS and a local bank Linth) and told them we wanted to see some offers for either 100% Libor mortgages or 100% 5 year fixed mortgages.

Unlike the US, 20-30 year mortgages don’t really exist here. The highest model offered to people is usually a 10 year fixed mortgage. As I’ve said before, the point of your mortgage is not to pay the whole house back by then. After 10 years, you simply have to refinance your mortgage for another 1-10 years, depending on your plans. If you would secure a 10 year mortgage, it is usually not in your interest to try to “sell off” the mortgage with the house. Unless interest rates have skyrocketed, a 10 year fixed rate is usually more than what buyers would be able to find on their own for the same amount of time left on your mortgage. Buying a place with a 30 year mortgage and then selling it off? Forget about it. It doesn’t work like that here.

Since we are coming to a crossroads in about five years, we do not want to be tied to the flat longer than that. Five year fixed rates are also MUCH cheaper than 10 year fixed rates, so that’s a bonus too.

Kay went back and forth between the banks and let the bankers battle it out… we were just interested in getting the best rate possible, which we made clear from the start! It came down to a very exciting hour as Kay was calling me telling me he’d had both guys on the phone and needed to call one of them back and make a decision…. soooo, we went with the small bank!

Bank Linth bent over backwards to meet our goals and they were very excited that we promised to move all our money over to them. I am a little sad to leave English online-banking and paperwork (ugh, German paperwork… ugh!) but it will be good for me. (Hopefully.) And the advisor at Bank Linth was really the nicest out of all the people we met with.

UBS? I was really disappointed. We have almost all our money with them now and then sent this stodgy old man to talk to us. He didn’t even try offering us a first-time buyers mortgage like ZKB did. And when he heard we had better offers than him, he just said “Oh, that’s too low! We can’t do anything about it.” Not really a salesman in my eyes. I’d much rather work with a small bank and receive the care and attention we deserve. (Ok, I think we deserve it…!)

Homebuyers, did you go for a big bank or somewhere local? How did you make the choice?

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Neubau Progress: Bathroom

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After we signed for the flat we had to get down to business. Building was on a schedule and we needed to decide all of our customizations asap. Obviously the whole bathtub/shower switcheroo didn’t really work out like we wanted it to, but we could still change a few things in the bathrooms. We started out with drawings of the bathroom plans:

The guest bath above and the master bath below.

The architecture firm gave us a load of bathroom options online, but really we needed to head to Sanitas Troesch to “bemuster” or pick out all our customizations.

Since we couldn’t have a fancy bath, we went with the standard D-Code tub, but for the shower we upgraded the evil sliding doors to a solid glass wall on one side and a glass door on the other side. The thought was “Less moving parts, less mold”…

I was surprised again that we had to specify that we wanted a shower bar in the bathtub so that we could put the shower head high enough to shower. Um yeah, you didn’t let us swap the shower and the bathtub, but I still feel it is important to be able to actually shower in my damn master bath. Crazies.

If you’ll notice below lots of the pictures it says “kostenneutral”. This became a very common word in my German vocabulary because it means “cost neutral” and it meant those choices were included in the base price of the flat. Anything else had a price… and as we found out with the electric, everything would have a parts cost + labor + general contractor fee + builder’s tax + VAT tax on all that. Guh. But anyway, we were still going to make some changes!

It was a little scary though, because in Sanitas Troesch they gave us a million options and decisions to make and it was really easy to say “Let’s add this” here or there, not knowing what it would add up to. Some of the original picks were also no longer available because they were discontinued, so sadly sometimes we had to choose options that cost more that we didn’t even like as much (like our towel hooks, argh!)

It was nice seeing the fixtures in real life though. Kay really liked one of the more modern looking faucets that was cost neutral, but it had a very strange hinge attachment that I could foresee dirt/mold/soap scum collecting in and being a pain to clean. Everything I saw for the bathroom fixtures was being judged on my “cleanablity” scale. I do not want mold in our new flat! I convinced Kay that I didn’t want to be jamming q-tips up into the faucet handle to clean it, so we were going with the “boring” standard faucets. I think he’ll get over it.

Some bits were confusing too… Swiss have this thing about built-in soap dishes, cups, etc… that I find a bit strange, but they are in literally every house here. The sales man just sort of asked us what we wanted and where, but I kept wanting to know, “How much does that extra soap dish cost??” It was a bit stressful.

Toilets and sinks were an easy decision. We picked the prettier (rounder) cost neutral toilet. Not paying $2250 for that boxy toilet up there. And while I’m not necessarily in love with our double sink style, I also didn’t want to pay thousands to upgrade that either.

Our “chosen sink” came with a pretty naff cabinet underneath. Check that out? What is that space for?? Gathering dust? I wasn’t having that. Knowing me, I’d squish tissue boxes and bath supplies in there and it would totally ruin the clean, tidy look I’m hoping we’ll have in the bathroom. Not to mention, it would be a bitch to clean around those sinks. No, no this was not the cabinet for us.

Since we were picking everything out in as much detail as we wished, we were able to look through Sanita’s catalogue and I decided I wanted to go for a more traditional type of cabinet, while Kay was sad not to have more modern ones. The big drawers above seemed like they would be a pain to organize and I really wanted more drawers and some traditional hinge cabinets, so we came up with the option below. I just wanted everything to be practical!

But after we signed for everything, Sanitas came back and told us the cabinets above would be impossible with our double sink because the drawers would run into the faucets in the middle. We could change it slightly and put drawers in the middle and cabinets on the outside or all flat cabinets, but it ruined my idea of splitting up drawers between Kay and myself, so we said “screw it” and went with the original giant drawer below:

And honestly, I can’t really remember if it is the one above or if it will really have two drawers… the decision came after the bathroom contract and it’s been so long since we decided everything that I’m afraid when we check the finished flat, we’ll have forgotten what we even chose if we don’t have the proper documentation for it. I’m only left with the plans that still include the cabinet and drawer combo above. (Things like this keep me up at night…)

For the half bath, we were surprised to learn that it didn’t come with an under sink cabinet at all. That just wouldn’t do. I mean, I plan on putting toilet paper and crap for guests under there. And tampons. You know, IMPORTANT stuff.

We went with a simple two door cabinet because they don’t make the gianormous drawer cabinets in this width. I am happy.

I am even happy with our giant drawer. I was unsure how I felt about it when we first decided everything, but now I think it will be nice an streamlined and hopefully not too hard to organize…

Along with the master bath and guest bath we were surprised to learn this was when we had to pick out our basement cellar sink for the wash room. A small dinky sink came with the flat price, but we upgraded it a tad (at least I think we did…!) bigger sink. Kay convinced me that we don’t need a crazy laundry sink with ridges for scrubbing, because let’s be honest… how often do I hand wash things?

After a few rounds, all the bathrooms were sorted and we were on to bigger, bolder decisions.

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