Owning a house in Sweden had long been a dream of my husband's. Not necessarily to emigrate completely someday, but to have a place we could keep coming back to. A place where you don't just vacation, but actually spend time. In 2021, we finally decided to turn that dream into a real project.
What did we know about buying property in Sweden back then? Not much, really.
So we decided to work with a broker who supported German buyers purchasing property in Sweden. He helped with listings, brokered houses, sometimes had properties of his own on offer, and was above all our go-to person for all the questions that suddenly came up.
Today, you'd probably research a lot of that with AI first. In 2021, that wasn't really an option yet. So for us, it was worth its weight in gold to have someone to ask: What do we need to watch out for? Is this normal? And how does this even work here?
There were three decisions, though, that even the best broker couldn't make for us:
How much did we want to spend? Where in Sweden should the house be? And how much renovation work could we take on?
First, Clarify the Budget
Before we could seriously look at houses, we needed to know what we could actually spend. Financing through a Swedish bank wasn't a practical option for us as buyers living in Germany, without a Swedish personnummer and without income in Sweden.
So a few options remained: equity, money from family, a loan in Germany, or additional financing secured against an existing property. Since we already owned a house in Germany, we opted for a combination of equity and an additional loan secured against our house.
That gave us a fixed budget: around 100,000 euros. And with that, we could finally start searching in earnest.
But Where in Sweden?
My husband had spent a lot of time in the Värnamo region in the past and knew the area well. For regular trips, though, that was a bit far for us at the time, with our still-young son. We live in Rostock, about ten minutes from the ferry port. The ferry to Trelleborg takes around six hours, and after that we didn't want to spend forever in the car.
So our limit was roughly: three to four hours' drive from Trelleborg. That focused us on Skåne and southern Småland. We compared listings, prices, and regions, and eventually found ourselves drawn more and more to the area between Växjö and Kalmar. Here, the balance of nature, location, and property prices worked for us. Above all, we could still find houses within our budget that didn't need to be fully renovated. At least in theory.
Our First House in Orrefors
One of the first houses we seriously looked at was in Orrefors.
The starting price was around 600,000 SEK, and at first glance it looked interesting.
On site, though, reality set in pretty quickly.
The house sat in the middle of a residential area, the basement was damp, the windows showed traces of mold in places, and overall it was clear: there would be a lot of work ahead of us.
At the same time, we learned about a quirk of the Swedish property market: many houses are sold through a bidding process – the budgivning.
The listed price is a starting point, but not necessarily the price the house will ultimately sell for. Interested buyers submit bids, and the seller ultimately decides who to sell to. During our search, we also fairly quickly got the impression that a lot of Germans were house-hunting too. And at least for the houses that interested us, that usually meant:
Prices went up, since Germans are used to very different price levels for houses. The house in Orrefors eventually sold for around 900,000 SEK.
We were out. In hindsight, we were pretty relieved. Given how much renovation it needed, the purchase price would only have been the beginning.
Another House. And Another.
More viewings followed.
Among other things, we found a really pretty summer house that we actually bid on. We had already started picturing ourselves in it. And then we got outbid. Again, by Germans.
At some point I started searching Swedish property websites myself as well.
Our broker remained our main contact and checked the paperwork, but why shouldn't we also keep an eye on what was newly coming onto the market?
And eventually a house turned up in a small town we had probably never heard of before:
Målerås.
And Suddenly, There Was This House
This house had something special from the very start. No spectacular estate, no luxury property, and no perfectly polished listing either. It was simply cozy. The terrace. The garden. The kitchen. The floors. Renovated. The many small, loving details.
You could tell from the pictures alone that the previous owners had done a lot of the work themselves. They were clearly big fans of upcycling and had renovated and designed much of it with real care. That's exactly what appealed to us.
I requested the listing and sent it to our broker. He reviewed the documents and initially saw nothing that fundamentally spoke against the house. Still, with Swedish houses you should look closely. Moisture in the basement, the roof, heating, water and sewage, electrics, or, in older houses, building materials like asbestos can all be important issues. Buyers in Sweden also have an extensive duty to inspect the property themselves. In our case, the bigger known issues were manageable: the heating was old. So were the roof, doors, and windows. That could eventually get expensive, but otherwise the house had already been extensively renovated.
New kitchen, new bathroom, floors, painting, terrace, and outdoor areas – a lot of what you see in our photos today was already there back then. So we decided: we'd bid. Even though we had never set foot in the house.
650,000 SEK – and Off We Went
The starting price was 650,000 SEK.
For this house, we could bid quite easily by text message.
And then the familiar game began.
We placed a bid. The other interested buyer raised it. We raised it. He raised it.
And of course, our competing bidder was German again. At that point it was starting to feel like our own personal Swedish-house comedy. We kept going up by 10,000 SEK at a time. He kept matching us. Eventually we were at 810,000 SEK.
My absolute pain threshold was 900,000 SEK. And I was slowly losing patience with just waiting for the other bidder to outbid us again.
So Let's Make a Direct Offer
So I asked our broker:
Couldn't we just make the sellers a direct offer?
900,000 SEK. We'll buy right now for that. Or we drop out and the seller gets 810,000 SEK. And indeed, the sellers agreed.
That's actually something that's entirely possible when buying a house in Sweden. A bidding process isn't a rigid auction, and the seller isn't necessarily obligated to just keep waiting for the next higher bid.
You can also make a direct offer. Houses can be sold through contacts, or a seller may decide on a buyer before the bidding escalates further. In our case, it worked. 900,000 SEK. We got the house.
Just one small detail was still missing: we still had never actually seen the house in person.
Buying a House You Only Know from the Internet
Looking back, it does sound a bit crazy.
We had photos. We had the listing. We had the documents. Our broker had checked everything. But we had never walked through the front door. So we arranged a trip to Sweden for December. That's where the viewing – and, if everything checked out, the contract signing – was supposed to take place.
And indeed: the house looked exactly like it did in the pictures. Of course, you noticed things on site that photos don't necessarily convey. The heating really was old. So was the roof. But we already knew that. Otherwise, the house made a genuinely good impression. Not perfect. But ours. At least, that's how it already felt.
Buying a House Without a German Notary Appointment
The purchase contract process is also quite different in Sweden compared to Germany. For a standard house purchase there, you don't need notarial certification like we do in Germany. We went through the documents together with the broker and signed the purchase contract there. We also didn't have to pay the broker's fees, since the seller had commissioned the broker.
In addition to the purchase price, the main extra cost for us was the state fee for registering ownership.
The so-called lagfart generally costs private individuals a 1.5 percent stamp duty on the relevant assessment basis, plus a processing fee.
For a purchase price of 900,000 SEK, that works out to – simplified, assuming no higher tax assessment value applies:
Purchase price: 900,000 SEK
Stamp duty 1.5%: 13,500 SEK
Lagfart fee: 825 SEK
Resulting incidental costs: 14,325 SEK
Compared to buying property in Germany, the typical closing costs were pretty manageable for us.
Ten Percent Down Payment – Then Waiting
After signing the contract, we first had to make a ten percent down payment. The rest of the purchase price was due later. The handover itself, though, wasn't scheduled until summer 2022.
The previous owners were still waiting to move into their new house, and that was completely fine with us.
So it was time to wait. The handover finally took place in June 2022.
We went through everything together, there was a detailed handover report, the keys changed hands, and our somewhat crazy property project finally became reality.
From summer 2022 on, we were officially: Swedish homeowners.
Would We Do It the Same Way Again Today?
Maybe not every single step. Today it's much easier to find information yourself, get documents translated, or understand Swedish terms and procedures. In 2021, our contact person was therefore incredibly helpful to us. And even though our story might sound like we just spontaneously bought some random house off the internet, it wasn't quite like that.
We had clarified our budget beforehand. We had narrowed down the region. We knew our financial pain threshold. We had the documents checked. And we knew that bigger investments like heating and the roof might be coming our way eventually.
What we didn't do: wait for the perfect house. Because we probably would have never found it.
Our house wasn't perfect. But it felt right from the start. What began as a property listing in a small Swedish town we'd barely heard of became our second home.
And the thought:
"Maybe someday we could have a house in Sweden"
eventually turned, quite naturally, into:
"When are we going back to Målerås?"
Sometimes an adventure doesn't start with a perfect plan. It starts with a listing on the internet and a fairly spontaneous offer.
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