Hungarian wage earners can buy a 50-square meter apartment in Budapest for the forint equivalent of €97,300, or the average wage for eight and a half years, according to a comparative study of real estate prices in the Visegrád Four capitals of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Czechia along with Bucharest, Romania.
Based on the official data of the statistical offices and central banks of Romania and the Visegrád countries, Hungary’s largest real estate portal Ingatlan.com indicated that in the second quarter of this year, the purchase of an apartment in Prague required Czechs to have the equivalent of €149,000, equal to 8.6 years of average wages. The price of a 50-square-meter apartment in Warsaw is more than 42 million zlotys, which means an average salary of 8.8 years in Warsaw.
According to the data from Ingatlan.com, the Bratislava market is by far the most expensive in this comparison, as an apartment of a similar size in the Slovak capital costs an average of €143,600, but this amounts to almost 11 years of average salary in Bratislava.
And a study of Romania found that in Bucharest, too, an average net salary of almost 9.5 years is needed to buy a 50-square-meter apartment.
At the same time, it was noted that although a property of this size costs only €77,200 in the Romanian capital, the monthly net wages are also much lower.
Ingatlan.com real estate market analyst László Balogh said that housing prices relative to salaries are more expensive now than they were in 2018: in Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest, a 7.5-year net average salary was required for a 50-square-meter apartment while in Bratislava it was the equivalent of more than eight years of wages.
