The proportion of foreign home buyers in Hungary is consistently high, last year almost eight thousand, and in the first half of this year more than 3,200 foreign citizens bought real estate in Hungary, wrote Bank360.
According to data from the Central Statistical Office (KSH), nearly 8,000 foreign citizens bought apartments in Hungary last year, more than in 2018, which was the peak of the years before the coronavirus epidemic (almost 7,300 at the time). Foreigners spent an average of HUF 43.3 million to buy an apartment in 2022, while in 2018 it was “only” HUF 25.2 million.
This year, with the decline in housing market turnover, purchases by foreigners also moderated, but to a lesser extent than by Hungarians, so their share of all sales and purchases increased. In the first half of this year, 3,246 Hungarian properties were bought by foreigners.
In the inner districts of Pest – the V., VI., VII., VIII. and the IX. in the district – every fifth customer was already a foreigner.
The majority of buyers are still German, in 2022 German citizens bought 2,127 apartments, which is two-thirds more than a year earlier and almost twice the number of purchases in the peak year of 2018. Last year, every second German bought a property in the counties of Somogy or Zala.
According to the data of the 2022 census, 98,319 foreign citizens officially lived in Budapest last year. The two most populous diasporas are the Chinese and the Ukrainian, but their share of the total foreign population in Budapest is still only 15.2 and 14 percent, respectively. We wrote more about the ethnic diversity of the capital here.
