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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland has an imperfect system with some good features. Landlords can't raise the rent without cause. The cause can be that the variable mortgage interest rate went up (and the tenant can reverse the increase if it goes down), or that the unit has been remodeled.

The government can also apply a global increase or decrease to rents in a city, based on study of the market conditions.

The tenant can object within X days of signing that the previous tenant's rent was less. That rent has to be made available for comparison. That makes it hard to raise rents by kicking people out.

There are many additional parts that the Swiss get wrong, but the above is a good start.

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One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are taxed. Discourages keeping properties empty.

Getting people to pay income tax on income they don't earn might be a good solution to unemployment.

Through higher suicide rates?

They're always free to sell.

> Getting people to pay income tax on income they don't earn might be a good solution to unemployment.

That's not equivalent, I hope you're being sarcastic.

People who can afford not to rent out an expensive property are almost by definition multi-millionaires.

> People who can afford not to rent out an expensive property are almost by definition multi-millionaires.

Those people (and those properties) do not make up all, or even most, of the picture.

To quote ch.ch:

> Your landlord must give you a clear explanation for raising your rent. Justifiable reasons could be an increase in the reference interest rate, inflation, increased maintenance costs or an investment that increases the value of the property e.g. the installation of additional kitchen appliances.

It is interesting that there is no hard cap mentioned. Inflation, interest rate and maintenance cost all skyrocketed last year, would a 5 percent rent increase be possible? Or could that be refuted?

For comparison, The Netherlands has set a max rent increase of 4.1 percent for 2023. In 2022 this was 2.3 percent.

In germany, to avoid rent caps, many landlords moved to so called index rent, which is bound to inflation/deflation and there is no cap and can not be refuted.

Though, politics is everywhere, and they want to cap the index rents as well. Make sense, because why can everyone raise prices, while salaries do not automatically rise. There is no balance.

Price controls are great for incumbents, but suck for new-comers or even incumbents who want to move. Disabling price as the allocation mechanism does nothing to address the supply/demand problems, and necessitates alternative allocation rules (waiting lists, insider connections, fit/need-based, lotteries) which all have their own problems.

In the Netherlands the average waiting time for rent-controlled social houses in popular places like Amsterdam and Utrecht now exceed 10 years.

Switzerland has the same problem.

If the rent increase has been determined by market conditions to be 10%, incumbents have their rent increased by 40% of that, so 4%. And it's not asymptotic. If the rent increase next year is 0%, the incumbents still pay just 104% of the basis rent.

Over time, incumbents have unbeatable rent and can't afford to move, and newcomers pay an extortionate amount, which is the present status quo. The Swiss also blame the newcomers for raising the rents, even though they are the victims.

I'm pretty sure it's tied to the interest rate, it can be higher than the rate interest, but only within a limit. (I'm currently a bit worried by this, but have not heard anything from my landlord)

Coming from the UK, i find the system here vastly more sensible, having been kicked out of multiple residencies in the UK because landlords felt like raising rents by outrageous amounts

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