ZURICH. Zurich, Geneva and Basel keep losing residents to cheaper neighbouring cantons, and the flats do not get any easier to rent. A new analysis by the property consultancy Wüest Partner, reported on Monday, finds that the departures are more than replaced by people arriving from abroad. Demand in the three most expensive urban cantons is not easing, and neither, on this reading, are rents.
The figures for Zurich are the starkest. The canton loses about 3,500 residents a year to the rest of Switzerland and takes in a net of nearly 19,000 people from abroad. Geneva loses about 1,400 residents a year to other cantons and gains about 10,300 from outside the country. The people who leave are, in the consultancy’s account, often those priced toward a neighbouring canton. The people who arrive keep the housing queue intact. A city can watch its own citizens go and still have a tighter market in December than in January.
What this does to the rent argument
Advertised rents in the city of Zurich were already the political exhibit of the last two years. They rose 4.1 per cent in a year at the fastest pace since 2017, and a later monthly dip did not unwind that. The Wüest Partner note is not a new index of asking rents. It is an explanation of why the index has so little room to fall. Internal migration relieves a household. It does not relieve a city, if every household that leaves is replaced, several times over, by arrivals who also need a lease.
Basel is grouped with the other two in the same pattern: high rents, a flow out to cheaper cantons, and a flow in from abroad that keeps demand firm. The consultancy’s conclusion is blunt. The demand for housing in these cantons shows no sign of easing. That is the sentence landlords will quote and the sentence tenants’ groups will treat as a reason for tighter rules, not as a reason to wait.
The part of the market politics already touches
Short-term lets are the piece of this argument parliament and the cities have already started to regulate. Lucerne has capped nights, and a national register is on the table. A migration study does not, by itself, say how many of the new arrivals are workers, students, refugees or corporate transferees, and the Monday report did not publish a split. Treating “immigration” as a single cause of a Zurich rent is less precise than the numbers. The numbers say something narrower and harder to argue with: the people who leave are outnumbered by the people who arrive, and the stock of homes is not keeping up with that arithmetic.
For anyone hunting a lease in Zurich, Geneva or Basel this winter, the study is not a forecast of next month’s advert. It is a reason the adverts have stayed scarce while friends move to Aargau, Vaud or Basel-Landschaft. The cheaper canton is absorbing the household. The expensive one is absorbing the demand.