What do this fabulous Pest penthouse and this homely countryside cottage have in common?

10 júl, 2012

A few weeks ago the District IX section of the Budapest neighborhood website ittlakunk.hu had a short item proudly relaying that the district is home to the most expensive flat in Pest. The penthouse (left) sitting atop the DUNA-PEST REZIDENCIÁK (Duna-Pest Residences) has six rooms with a total floor space of 430 square meters and a terrace that is even larger, at a staggering 480 sqm. Meanwhile, the TriGránit-built complex sports two pools, a gym, a Jacuzzi, sauna, squash, a card room and access to free trainers and masseuses. As for what it all costs, it’s not so easy to say.

While the story says the price is HUF 766 million (roughly EUR 2.67 million) – plus monthly service charges (közös költség) of HUF 214,000 – when we called up the listing agent Piramis Ingatlan to ask about the flat, they were reluctant to give out any information beyond the fact that it is on the market, claiming that the owner had received “unsolicited inquiries” because of stories like this.

Given that the ittlakunk.hu item was mostly a re-write of a much more in-depth story about the flat published on another website last August, it’s safe to say that the place has been on the market for at least a year, and possibly much longer, as the building was apparently completed in 2004.

Which to our mind nicely sums up the entire market for high-end residential real estate in Hungary: Even when a premier property on the market gets lots of media exposure, it is likely to end up sitting empty for years before changing hands.

Meanwhile, the same situation seems to apply for properties at the absolute other end of the market. Case in point is this item published on Ingatlan menedzser last November about vacation homes for sale in the countryside for around HUF 1 million (EUR 3,250). We went back and checked up on the properties mentioned in the piece, and from what we can tell all of them – including the adorable little nyaraló sitting on a roomy 3,400-sqm plot in Sümeg pictured above – are still on the market, even though you could buy 500 of them for the price of that penthouse and still have enough left over for one of Buda’s growing number of unsellable villas.

REALDEAL