Mr. and Mrs. Schweizer’s living situation has changed significantly in recent years. Not only the corona pandemic, but also other factors play a major role here. UBS data shows that, for example, people are leaving the city of Basel more and more often. People are moving out of town.
The reasons are varied: too expensive rents, too few construction projects and interesting neighboring communities. While Swiss people are fleeing from Basel, more and more people from abroad are moving to the city on the Rhine. However, Basel is not alone in this flight trend, as a look at the UBS data shows.
The cities of Bern and Zurich are also struggling with exactly the same problem, although not quite as pronounced. But the fact is: people want to get out of the cities and into the agglomeration or the countryside.
“A lot has been built around Bern in recent years,” says Claudio Saputelli, head of real estate at UBS, to Blick. That made the places outside of Bern more attractive. In Zurich, the main problem is that the city is “bursting at the seams,” says Saputelli. For this reason, a lot is being built in the neighboring communities.
Freiburg “absorbs all of western Switzerland”
The latest UBS figures also show that many more people “moved to the countryside” in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, compared to 2017-2019. In the city of Zurich, domestic immigration weakened “strongly” compared to previous years, as the statistics show.
At the same time, regions in the cantons of Graubünden, Vaud and St. Gallen recorded a “very strong increase in newcomers” who had moved away from other cantons such as Zurich.
According to Saputelli, a surprising development has happened in western Switzerland: “There is currently a lot of construction going on in western Switzerland, but this is particularly evident in the greater Freiburg area”.
Winterthur and St. Gallen remain stable
Lausanne, on the other hand, has had a very negative level of domestic immigration over the past five years – precisely because “Freiburg absorbs a lot from the Lake Geneva region”. This is also where the number of homes rose the most in 2020. Overall, however, one has to take into account that there is generally less construction in Switzerland, which is due to the high vacancy rate, according to Saputelli.
While the city of Lucerne still had to put up with many emigrants between 2016 and 2018, the situation increasingly stabilized from 2019 onwards. Of the ten largest Swiss cities, however, Winterthur has by far the best domestic immigration. Here, as the only major city, the balance between native immigrants and emigrants has actually been positive on average over the last five years.
Pandemic triggers “shock trend”.
The shift from urban to rural living is no accident, Saputelli knows. “Due to the pandemic and the home office, the desire to have your own four walls has increased,” explains the expert. As a result, the periphery is becoming more and more attractive.
Because: More and more people would decide not only to align their place of residence with the workplace, but also to pay attention to other wishes. “The whole thing is of course a kind of shock trend. The home office has boomed abruptly due to the current situation, but normalization is only to be expected in a few years”.
According to Saputelli, office buildings and employers are increasingly having to compete with private living space, particularly in terms of convenience and flexibility. The trend will then flatten out again, but there will be no return to “pre-corona circumstances”.