Many foreign investors had been “burnt” by various agencies and property management companies in Budapest.

Either by unprofessional handling of the apartment, partial payment of fees and municipal costs, long periods of vacancy, and even due rentals fees which were not transferred.

The risk of owning a property abroad always hold problems such as receiving partial amounts of monies or false information from the  appointed representative maintaining the property. perhaps the most concerning factor is the lack of ability/will to “push” the property in the rentals market by the appointed agency due to various reasons, having it sitting empty for months while fees are accumulating.

Throughout the last few years, two main issues which were constantly repeated in all of the related forums were:

1. how to shorten the vacancy period.
2. how to minimize the (already high) agency’s fee.

The real problem is that since landlords have a limited access to the real situation on the ground, it became extremely difficult for them to push and promote their properties to newly arriving tenants and gain control over the marketing of their available properties by themselves. as a result, they became dependent on the professionalism and “good will” of the property management companies and agencies in  Budapest and other cities across Hungary.


A solution for this problem is to take control of the marketing of your available apartments by publishing on websites which (mainly) focus on expats living in Hungary and Foreign students who study in Hungary in one of the main international universities (such as: szent-istvan, elte, erasmus, corvinus, Mcdaniles, semmelweis etc.). An added benefit, other than “pushing” your vacant apartment over other apartments managed by your selected realty agency,  is that by finding a tenant yourself, you save on the “agency’s success fee” and pay only the management fee to the property management company (if its a decent one..), this saves a considerable amount, as it reduces the overall fee to about a half!

• If you made investments in Hungary and your property management company is not able to find tenants, I Recommended the following real-estate portal for finding tenants for your properties in Budapest: www.RoomMatesBudapest.com.