Buying an apartment in Sweden. Where to look? What are the prices?

In Sweden it is easier to buy an apartment than to find one to rent long-term. That is not to say that buying is a dead-simple process, but the supply is way greater and competition lower. This post is an overview of that supply. Booli.se is great for checking out some stats — all the numbers below are retrieved from there. Note that Booli gets its information from multiple sources, so some details for particular properties might get garbled in the process, but it still works beautifully for assessing the general picture.

Prices in different cities

Let’s try Stockholm first.

Apartments sold in 2024 so far: 20495
Lowest price: 350 000 SEK for 57m² (this is quiet an outlier, we're up to 1 million SEK within the first 9 listings; the very first one is a misclassified warm garage)
Highest price: 72 000 000 SEK for 300m² (also an outlier, the prices are down to 30-ish million after 4 listings)
Lowest price per square meter: 6 200 SEK/m², quickly followed by 14 000+ SEK/m²
Highest price per square meter: 348 700 SEK/m², immediately followed by prices somewhat above 200 000 SEK/m²
Biggest fall from the suggested price during the bidding: -88.7% immediately followed by -30.6%
Biggest raise from the suggested price during the bidding: +940%, +900%, +881.7%, 811.3%, and 135.2% immediately followed by +66.8%
There are approximately 13600 apartments for which the change in the price was positive due to the bidding (the rest got sold for the asking price or lower). That's roughly ⅔ of total.

Apartments for sale (including new construction): 8807
Lowest asking price: 800 000 SEK for 26.5m²
Highest asking price: 69 000 000 SEK for 323m²
Lowest asking price per square meter: 13 800 SEK/m²
Highest asking price per square meter: 350 000 SEK/m².

To summarize, there are thousands of apartments available, they cost a few million (7 million will get modestly sized 2 rooms in fancy Östermalm, 3 million is 1 room in Södermalm or 2–3 rooms a bit more outside of downtown, 1 million is something like 25m² in Rinkeby that's been on sale for a year). Those are asking prices though, and bidding changes them a lot, usually upwards.

Prices in other places in Sweden are somewhat lower, but not ten times lower.
For comparison:

• in Gothenburg, the second biggest city, there were more than 7500 apartments sold in 2024 so far, the cheapest being 39m² (~0.7 million SEK), and the most expensive one — 285m² (30 million). There are more than 5000 apartments available for sale with the asking prices ranging from 0.8 million to 70 (within the 20 most expensive apartments though it comes down to 14 million)
• in Malmö, the third biggest city, 4884 apartments were sold. Cheapest: 83m² for 0.25 million, most expensive: 201m² for 19.4. More than 2500 apartments are for sale with the asking prices 0.45–23 million SEK
• in Umeå, the biggest city in Norrland, 889 apartments were sold. Cheapest: 76m² for 0.82 million, most expensive: 137m² for 8. A bit fewer than 500 apartments are for sale with the asking prices 0.7–6 million SEK.

With crazy expensive and crazy small apartments removed from consideration, the most common range for an apartment in Sweden comes out at 1–5 million SEK (approximately 100–500k EUR). I’ll get into more details later in this series of posts, but generally speaking there are two things necessary to get a mortgage: 1) 15% of the final price for the apartment, and 2) proof of stable yearly income I such that final price ≤ 4.5×I. For example, if Anders has 150k SEK in his account and a permanent contract with his employer where his yearly salary comes to 222k before tax (monthly ~18.5k), he will most probably get a loan to buy an apartment for 1 million. If he wants an apartment for 2 million, he’ll need both to save up more (300k) and get a raise (to 444k yearly/37k monthly). It is also very important to keep that job contract permanent, and it is beneficial to have it in SEK and not any other currency. Your permit status (whether you're a citizen, or here on a work permit, or on a blue card, etc) is not at play when buying an apartment.

Monthly fee

There is in fact a second part to the price question, and that’s månadsavgift (or just avgift). This is the monthly fee set by the owners association, and it finances all the expenses, from paying off the loan for the building(s) to utilities like the trash being taken away or the internet.

Apartments in a newly built house might have a higher avgift because the loan for it is still very high. In older buildings it might also become high if there’s a major renovation coming up and the owners association did not plan for it particularly well. Also, if the land on which the building stands is not owned but rented by the association, the avgift depends on the ever-rising rent (it is reviewed every few years as a rule).

Photos in the ads

Unlike rentals, the apartments for sale are meticulously photographed. They might look a bit weird at first — what’s with the close-up pictures of the fruit on the kitchen counter? Does everyone who sells an apartment really have that many pillows? What's with the champagne on the balcony? Why do so many apartments look so much alike? The answer is, pretty much everyone uses a professional’s services, and that’s what they make out of any apartment. The owners are supposed to clean it very thoroughly and then adjust it to fit into the standard look which is meant to give the prospective buyers a “fresh” feeling. Or, well, a fräsch one, to be precise. Staging the apartment might include everything from light touches to hauling in the furniture, lamps, and curtains. It is supposed to help people visualize their own stuff in the apartment and show what life could be.

Where to look

There is a Swedish word for spending a lot of time on the internet looking at the properties (mostly those you can’t afford): hemnetberoende (Hemnet-addiction). But it’s not just hemnet.se where one can do that.

• Booli — made by a privately owned company and then sold to the state-owned SBAB bank, this website positions itself as a search engine for property ads. Sellers don’t directly put an ad on booli — they put it somewhere else, and booli finds it, which is why it tends to have the most of them. Good supporting information: history of sales nearby, development of the prices in the area over the past few years, high-level assessment of the owners association. Warning: since they take the ads from multiple places, it doesn’t always work out perfectly; for example, a house might have 14 hectares of land but booli’s parser will mistake it for 14 square meters, and the house won’t appear in a search for “more land than 100 m²”.
• Hemnet — made by a bunch of brokers but sold to an American private equity firm in 2016 which led to a price hike for the brokers using the service. No ads from private individuals here. Possible to filter by visningtid — for example, only show the apartments which you can visit this weekend. Good supporting information: development of the prices in the area over the past few years, a map where you can calculate the time it takes to get from the apartment to somewhere else by car, bike, or public transport.
• blocket.se’s Bostad — made by a privately held company, open for person-to-person sales. Apartments are not their focus (blocket.se is for selling anything and everything) so there is no supporting information, just the ad itself. Several years ago the owners of Blocket tried to buy Hemnet, but couldn’t do it due to competition law.
• Boneo — owned by Länsförsäkringar and a few other big brokers who claim to have a third of the market together. Created as a reaction to the price hike of Hemnet’s services. No supporting information. Besides Sweden, covers a few other countries (for summer houses and such). They try to compete with Hemnet with lower prices for the seller and with allowing to put out an “upcoming” ad for free.
• BoVision — used to be cool before Hemnet. Exists since 1996 and has been sold a few times, currently owned by another private company. Besides Sweden, covers a few other countries like France and the US. Doesn’t show the search results on a map. No private ads. No supporting information.

Historical mention:

• HittaHem — bought by Bonnier News, the big old corporation owning a lot of Swedish media outlets. Used to be a site where you could draw the search area on the map (as opposed to the usual functionality of filling in the name of the district or whatever). These days it's targeting sellers and not buyers, so you can't search for apartments there anymore.

Unfortunately, filtering is not overly developed on either of these websites. Want to have a bathtub, and not just a shower? Not interested in the apartments on the ground floor? Want to ensure the dishwasher is already there? Maybe looking at the houses and want to consider only those connected to the internet by fiber? None of these things can be filtered by. The user of the website can either search by the keywords (hoping that the broker decided to highlight exactly those features in the short text of the ad) or go through every photo of every ad which matches easier parameters (e.g. price, size — those can be filtered by). They have started adding tags like balkong (balcony) and hiss (elevator) on Hemnet and Booli eventually, but it doesn’t look like 100% coverage. Similarly, on Boneo there are some search keywords to be selected (e.g. balcony, terrace) but they aren’t many and don’t seem to cover all the ads either.

For a humorous side of the apartment search, check out Hemnetknarkarna’s instagram.

Appendix: key words in Swedish

To filter in Booli’s interface:

• till salu = for sale
• slutpriser = final prices (as in the price for which it was actually sold)
• nyast = newest (as it came in to the website)
• pris = price
• lägst = lowest
• högst = highest
• kvmpris = square meter price
• prisutveckling = change of price (due to bidding or, in the 'for sale' ads, due to the owner changing their mind)
• avgift = monthly payment for using the apartment (i.e. planned renovations fund, utilities like water; but not electricity — that's paid individually)
• boarea = living area (size of the apartment)
• bostadstyp = type of the place: apartment, house, etc
• lägenhet = apartment