The US had Zillow and Redfin and realtor[dot]com so when you see some random house of interest, you can get an idea of how expensive it (and the market) is for that area.
It’s a good passtime the wife and I have…while riding 2 up on a motorcycle, we joked that it would be a great phone app…one of my podcasts uses ‘Hey Shlomo’ as a stand-in for Hey Siri so all the listeners won’t activate their phones…so during the ride we’d call out ‘Hey Schlomo! Drop a pin’ every time we saw a cute house, or a McMansion, or a 5th wheel on a plot of land with a fantastic view. You could then go back to any of the realestate apps and look up the properties.
Do similar apps exist for Japan…London…Jamaica…Mexico…Scotland…France?
Because I’ll see something in the background of a youtube video and am REALLY curious what that little apartment above the Sushi cart costs to live in.
The big one in Israel is Yad2 (“Yad” means “hand”), which sells everything, not just real estate. Other leading sites are Madlan (which provides a lot more information about house prices and so on) and Homeless.
Rightmove is the go to in the UK, along with Zoopla and Prime Location. Basically, if there’s a house for sale in the UK, it will almost certainly be on Rightmove.
An interesting question to be sure. Thanks for asking it; I’ll also be poking at some of those non-US websites.
IMO …
At a strictly practical level, the various governments’ restrictions on immigration or semi-permanent residency and on furriners owning real property are probably a larger obstacle than raw money supply for any middle class or better Westerner thinking of changing countries / cities.
Yeah, e.g. Tokyo is very expensive on an absolute scale. So an e.g. US middle class person hell-bent on living there is not going to be having a penthouse with a view and a housekeeper. More like a room backing up to a railway. But if you really wanna live there it’s probably doable. Those cities have working poor too, just like US cities do.
Of course the opposite approach is also doable. And perhaps more interesting. Namely
I have $X. I want to live like a Yth degree fatcat. Where (if anywhere) can I do that?
According to this link, there are actually 3 room apartments (2 bedrooms plus kitchen) from 120,000 to 2,200,000 CHF.
Probably most of those are unliveable (poor location, horribly out of date, etc.) until you get to the 500,000 CHF level. And even many of those are still a bit old. And this is for an apartment, not a house.
Forget living in Switzerland unless you’re independently wealthy (really wealthy, like Phil Collins) or are already working for a company with a Swiss office and you have special skills.
This article says a person only needs a 1,000,000 CHF to retire in Switzerland. That seems low.