Agents that help only the buyer of an apartment?

szocske wrote:

....... somewhere around 3-5% depending on exclusivity, but as houses and apartments are valued near and above the lifetime earnings of the average Hungarian, .....

We should also mention the lawyers fees which are based upon a percentage of the value of the property. Why a simple notarised transaction and template type contract should require a rip off percentage based fee, I do not know?! It's robotic work in the majority of cases so fixed fees should be the norm. I suppose the transaction costs limit Hungarians to only buying 1 or 2 houses maximum in their lifetimes (if that). People move much more often in other countries (like the USA, UK etc).

I agree with Szocske, if you are coming here on a contract with an international employer, they should be able to find someone to help you with the local market. To do it yourself the only way to really find the thing you want is to work through advertisements (there's lots online with criteria searching and filtering). We found our apartment looking through adverts on the internet (we found ours through "www.ingatlanbazar.hu"). We did not pay a fee (the landlord paid the real estate agent 1 months rent and we were not involved in that part of the deal). Renting might be a better option that buying until you get to know the areas.

If you widen your search you might find it easier than sticking with District 6. Districts 2, 3, 12 and some of the suburbs are nice too and easily commutable (when they finish fixing the bridges and the new metro line).

szocske wrote:

But the place to live for families is the Buda hillside, single and multi-family houses with small gardens, no traffic or crime on the streets, safe and quiet. .... within daily commute distance like Szentendre, Telki, Budaors (that one might be more expensive than Buda actually :-) ) and so on.

Absolutely right advice if you intend to live here in Hungary. I'd recommend sticking to the suburbs where you can have a garden, not the downtown area. Having a garden will allow the kids to let off steam in a safe environment and the summers are hot, they'd spend a lot of time outside anyway. It's also fairly common to have a swimming pool in upmarket houses (but dangerous for small kids). Telki, Paty or Zsambek are too far away from Budapest and not easy for services but they are survivable. Budaors is OK, so is Budakeszi (where I live) or perhaps Torokbalint. These places are serviced by the blue Budapest buses if you want to go to town and they all are all close to the big stores like Tesco, Ikea etc. Not really any need to go to town at all. Finally, I guess it depends if you want to send your kids to an international or local Hungarian school. We've found kindergartens are hard to get into as they are all full up. Bizarrely this seems to be becoming a major deciding factor in whether we'll stay here full time or go back to the UK and just come here during summer holidays.

O_B wrote:

Hi,

I read with great interest your views about the various parts of Budapest and you are right, all our schools (3 different British ones gives us continuity from their current&future school, views about them are welcome as well) are in the Buda hills.

There's also a large and relatively new American school in Nagykovacsi which is more or less in the suburbs of Buda. There are plenty of other nationality or otherwise oriented schools here - French, Austrian, Jewish and of course, the British ones. Bilingual schools and kindergartens are the "in" thing but they all seem rather pricey.

O_B wrote:

.. The Buda side might be to expensive for us. I sort of have a budget for this investment of say 180k Euro which seems to get me quite far in the 6th district as I read. But we also need plenty of rooms/sqm.

For EUR 180K, you can easily buy a decent house in the burbs. Apartments are not necessarily cheaper and can be more expensive than houses. Quite a lot of houses here are highly individualised and not churned out like a factory. They could be the classics of the future. Living in the city has a hassle factor, parking is difficult and a lot of the chain stores (like Ikea) are out in the burbs. It's not like the kind of living in New York or London. The entire scale of the place is much smaller.

O_B wrote:

I should mention that my wife is originally from this part of Europe but not Hungary, and that I view Budapest as an excellent transport hub, as Bangkok is in SE Asia. We will have direct flights to Gothenburg Sweden and to Bangkok as well as trains over night to family....

Regarding transport, I would say that it depends where you are going. Airlines come and go in this region (pun half intended) and you could find that the routes evaporate quickly. The air services here are formed by the triangle of airports of Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna. If you want to go to former CIS countries (the "stans") and onwards then Vienna is the better hub because it has good connections to Istanbul and Turkish Airlines hub there (there is always demand there because of the Turkish diaspora in Austria). On the other hand, Malev have some good routes I use myself like Syria and sometimes Thailand. Africa is hopeless from Budapest. You have to go to Vienna for that, then to Dubai on Emirates or Qatar Airlines (this also applies going to Singapore/NZ/Australia). North and South America I wouldn't know about but I'd say Vienna or transit through London or Madrid. Budapest itself serves limited locations (but that might increase as the airport is being expanded). Since it's only 220km approx between Vienna and Budapest and Schengen exists (no border controls), then it's driveable without too much difficulty. Bratislava isn't much of a hub as it's main services seem to be low cost airlines and parking is terrible. Parking at Vienna airport is ridiculously expensive. The demise of low cost carrier Sky Europe has severely dented services there. Austria has more airports than Hungary (Linz, Graz etc - crazy car parking prices again) which are served by low cost airlines like cheap Ryanair. Ryanair cancels routes regularly (e.g. the one to Balaton/Sarmallek) so buying property on a local airline route availability is probably not a major deciding factor. 

If your wife (like mine) can speak Hungarian, then that's a massive help. I found previously that I always paid a premium by speaking English. Costs were higher than if I could speak the local language. Speaking English is quite easy in the capitals of the region but anywhere outside the capital needs the local language. If English doesn't work, German is a good back up but it depends where one is at the time (in the West of Hungary, German is more common than English). It's not uncommon to find educated people who can do all three languages (Hungarian - as natives, English and German - as the secondary languages).

szocske wrote:

Or there's the island I live on (Szentendre island): a bridge is bound to be built in about 10-20 years, likely to double real estate prices, and ruin our sheltered life. But until then our village is safe for our kids, and by then, I won't care. But both of these developments have a chance of never happening!

Hey Szockse, perhaps you know why they didn't build an exit on Megyeri Bridge to the island?  It certainly would have opened up the Szentendre Island if not as development, but as access to park/leisure areas.

szocske wrote:

I do, but I'm not sure how interesting this could be for everyone else in this forum :-)

It was interesting to know. I know it seems off track but still relevant in that it could be considered part of investment knowledge since the island is so close to Budapest and therefore should be ripe for development at some point. I never understood where the M0 was going from Megyeri bridge on the Buda side. I presume it will go in a tunnel underneath Urom towards the M1 (East-West highway) and that entire band across to the M1 will eventually become an area for industrial and residential development. Land is relatively cheap in that band at the moment.

p.s. Subsequent to my post above, I discovered the following link. http://motorways-exitlists.com/europe/h/m0.htm#m0_m0