Husband and I used to live in Stockholm where he was born. Had a small two bedroom apartment that he bought in 2010. He paid 150 000€ for it. We owe 108 000€ on it with an interest rate of 1.12%.
It was just valued at 300 000 by rabid real estate agents trying to get us to sell it as the demand is over the roof.
Sweden is a very complicated place to be a private person renting out an apartment and that is not really a thing, we are only able to rent it out because we can still make a strong case that we would be coming back. Don't ask, socialism, it's what it is lol. But we're sure as hell not keeping it for the rental value.
We're keeping it out of inertia. If we sell we need to pay 20% capital gains tax. I have no idea what a real estate agent would charge, I think 2-3%. A part of me is thinking that sooner or later Sweden might abolish this tax on primary residences (some things point in that direction) so it might be worth to wait.
We charge 1300€ for rent but we need to pay all utilities from that (as I said, private renting is not really a thing in Sweden and you cannot just magically make a tenant responsible for these things) so in rest-of-the-world terms the rent we charge is maybe 850€. It clearly covers the expenses we have (we pay something like a 100€ in interest and we pay 10€ a month for owner's insurance) and the rest of the money we are distributing between paying down the principal and building a renovation fund. But it's after all a pain in the ass to deal with tenants (even though we've been lucky with this, partly because there is such a shortage of rentals there that people try hard not to lose what they managed to get).
We are somehow reluctant to sell for a bunch of sentimental reasons but also the fact that this price inflating madness is not showing any signs of stopping. It appeared to slow down last year after some legal changes (mortgages in Sweden used to be interest only, now you have to pay a bit on the principal as well, but still nowhere near all of it) and then wooosh, this year started off with yet another apparent price explosion.
My main reason not to sell is the fact that we don't really need the money and if we do sell, we have forever priced ourselves out of Stockholm (psychologically at least). For as long as we hold on to it, we have something that is very rare over there - affordable housing. On the other hand this has value only if we are seriously considering moving back there and that seems to be very, very unlikely (even if we were to return, this place is too small and a terrible school district).
I don't know, I feel torn. Because we joked last year that if we could get 300 000€ ok we sell and didn't actually think this was going to happen.
Any thoughts by all these smart people here?
