Chinese buying apartments in Hungary more and more as investment

15 comments

1. “Following its residency bond scheme set up several years ago, the Hungarian government is launching a new scheme for non-EU and non-EEA citizens, which will grant them a ten-year residence permit in exchange for a donation to a property or a trust, as well as for purchasing real estate.

   The new Hungarian “guest investor” scheme will come into force on 1 July, after the local and European elections

   [ … ]

   In terms of actual completed transactions, as in previous years, Chinese and Russian nationals were the most numerous buyers in 2023, with Chinese nationals purchasing 647 properties and Russians 223.”

2. This won’t end well. The most xenophobic people in the EU.

3. Good luck Hungary, you will get massively screwed over by this deal

4. Holy fuck hungarians really are letting themselves be fucked hard.

5. So people fleeing from the greatest real estate bubble the world has ever seen come here and buy apartments at the height of the greatest real estate bubble Hungary has ever seen. Some people just never learn.

6. This is why for me when we signed the Maastricht Treaty there should have been a strict minimum for obtaining an EU passport. It should not have been up to the member states. All it takes in one mafia country to start handing out golden passports like candy and you suddenly have no idea who is coming into the Schengen.

7. We are fucked up by our traitor government.

8. It’s a free market. Enjoy capitalism

9. Hungarians don’t even speak Russian or Chinese which is kind of hilarious to watch

10. Local Hungarians will have to suck up higher prices as they watch all the new jobs go to Chinese immigrants

    It’s happened in all other places China got its teeth into already

11. Similar stuff happening in Australia. Lot of investment properties from external investors. Now no one can afford houses.

12. This will make Hungarian apartments overpriced and unreachable for the general population and end up in a bubble. Congratulations to whoever invented this for screwing up the country!

13. Damn, Hungarians speedrunning housing crisis to be the number 1 lmao

14. Sure, this makes a snappy headline, but it’s pretty meaningless. Whether these apartments are bought up by Hungarian “robber barons”, Western European/US investment firms, Russian oligarchs, or the vague “Chinese” is effectively a distinction without difference. At the end of the day, it the common people who get fucked over, and just because it’s apparently done by some Chinese investors or whatnot doesn’t make it fundamentally different from what’s already been going on, both in Hungary and the rest of the world’s housing markets. It’s a bubble that only benefits people with more generational money than common sense, and it’s only a matter of time before it pops and we’ll get another 2007.

15. So Hungary did this before, non EU citizens could gain Hungarian citizenship through buying a government bond. The bond had to be bought via a company that was authorised by the government – there were only a handful, and they were all companies registered in tax havens like Belize and Seychelles, where ownership was hidden – surprise surprise, a few years later it turned out these agents were owned by people close to the Fidesz government who stole loads of this money… to cut a long story short, they didn’t do their due diligence properly and ended up handed out a bunch of golden passports to sanctioned people, criminals and those with close ties to corrupt and shady regimes, the whole scheme ended up loosing massive amounts of money (through theft) and the Hungarian taxpayer lost out massively before the scheme was scrapped after pressure from the EU. Despite this, large amounts of the Hungarian population are completely ambivalent, still vote for fidesz because gays bad, foreign people bad.