Are foreigners fleeing the Hungarian real estate market?

The Hungarian real estate market is no longer that attractive to foreigners. Among the approximately 125,000 transactions carried out on the Hungarian real estate market last year, in 2,524, cases the buyers were foreign investors who were not citizens of the European Union, the European Economic Area (EEA), or Switzerland.

The Hungarian real estate market did not experience a major price drop

As we have written before, despite stagnation and a slowly arriving turning point in the Hungarian real estate market, prices were still higher in most cases in Q4 2022 than a year earlier. The average price for new homes, according to KSH, was HUF 54.5 million (EUR 145 thousand) in Hungary, up HUF 8.5 million (EUR 22 thousand) compared to the previous year. The average price per square metre is HUF 900 thousand (EUR 2,400), HUF 180 thousand (EUR 480) more than the average price in 2021. Last year, there was no significant drop in prices on the Hungarian real estate market, which also affected the willingness of foreign citizens to purchase real estate.

From whch countries are people buying real estate?

The majority of real estate acquisition applications, 73 percent, concerned houses or apartments in the capital, writes infostart.hu. The capital was followed by Pest, then the counties of Zala and Győr-Moson-Sopron in the list of popular investment areas. Chinese property buyers are still the most active on the Hungarian market, although their share decreased from 36.3 percent in 2021 to 31.5 percent last year. Among the Chinese, the most popular areas within the capital were Angyalföld, Erzsébetváros and District X last year.

The proportion of Ukrainian buyers increased by 2.5 percentage points

What is new is that the proportion of Ukrainian buyers increased by 2.5 percentage points compared to the previous year’s data. Therefore, Ukrainians became the fourth largest group purchasing Hungarian real estate in 2022. The proportion of Russian investors increased by almost 1 percentage point by 2021, and Hévíz and the XIIIth district of the capital were still attractive to them. The share of Israeli investors rose by 2 percentage points to 7.41 percent, nearly half of the transactions concluded by them took place in the VIth district.

Citizens of the United Kingdom also acquired a significant proportion of over 5 percent of properties in Hungary last year, who mainly preferred apartments in the IXth district. The main target of the Americans in nearly 4.2 percent of the deals was Sóskút in Pest County.

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