With a 16% share of Switzerland’s gross domestic product and 592,000 full-time equivalents, real estate is a major contributor to the Swiss economy. The new version of the report “The Importance of Swiss Real Estate to the National Economy” and the interactive “Digital Atlas of Swiss Real Estate” quantify the importance of this sector. Both were produced by real estate consultancy pom+ on behalf of the Federal Housing Office (FHO) and HEV Schweiz, the Swiss landowners’ association.
Switzerland’s real estate stock comprises some 2.8 million buildings with a replacement value of 3,100 billion Swiss francs and a total floor area of over 1.1 billion m2 , of which almost two-thirds is residential space. The real estate sector makes a significant contribution to Switzerland’s gross domestic product (GDP), accounting for 11%. If we add rental income and the rental values of home-owning households, this figure rises to 16% of GDP. The real estate sector accounts for 14% of all jobs in Switzerland. Between 2011 and 2021, gross value creation attributable to real estate rose by 23%, compared with 17% for the economy as a whole.
Expanding building stock
Between 2011 and 2022, the number of buildings in Switzerland rose from 2.66 million to 2.82 million, with a high proportion of single-family homes (1 million). In relative terms, the number of multi-unit buildings rose by 15.5%, and single-family homes by 6.1%. A third of all buildings are concentrated in the cantons of Berne, Zurich and Aargau.
Value added varies from canton to canton
The importance of the real estate economy varies greatly from canton to canton. The share of gross value creation from real estate in cantonal GDP ranges from 8% in Basel-Stadt to 22% in Glarus, and tends to be lower in urban than in rural cantons.
Tax impact
All in all, the taxes paid by the real estate industry and those related to real estate included in the study generate some CHF 17.4 billion. This corresponds to 11% of Swiss tax revenues. Although the absolute amount of taxes generated by the real estate industry increased significantly between 2016 and 2021, the sector’s share of total tax revenues rose only slightly, given the overall increase in tax revenues recorded during this period.
Figures available online
Back in 2014, pom+ and Rütter Soceco AG produced a basic report on the economic importance of the real estate sector in Switzerland, whose key figures were updated for the first time in 2020 with the addition of cantonal data and a digital atlas of Swiss real estate. Current figures and the latest version of the report are available on the OFL website.
Source: Federal Housing Office
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