All properties for sale in Hungary could be bought from Amazon’s 6-month profit

Although there is a settlement in Borsod County where a detached house was for sale for 300 thousand forints last year, buyers have to dig much deeper into their pockets for most real estate purchases. Buying a home without family support is usually a serious challenge for most young people.

In Hungary, the average first-time buyer is 27 years old, but statistics only include those who own at least one property.

It is telling that according to an international survey, 

those who earn average wages in Hungary would have to save their full monthly pay for seven years in order to be able to buy a 70-square metre apartment.

However, if it was only a matter of money, a larger multinational company would be able to buy the total housing stock advertised for sale in Hungary relatively easily.

All palaces, mansions, blocks of flats, country houses and any other type of residential properties for sale could be bought by a Samsung-size conglomerate without even burning all their profit.

Just to see what kind of amounts are involved: the total value of the listed properties for sale on ingatlan.com in the first week of November 2020 was 3,768 billion forints, which is about 13 billion dollars.

County	Total value of properties for sale (million HUF)
Budapest	1 643 282
Pest	734 293
Győr-Moson-Sopron	84 114
Somogy	177 518
Hajdú-Bihar	126 548
Veszprém	125 319
Fejér	100 117
Zala	92 693
Csongrád-Csanád	90 658
Bács-Kiskun	84 160
Baranya	74 693
Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg	57 645
Vas	53 832
Heves	53 395
Komárom-Esztergom	44 023
Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén	43118
Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok	32 887
Tolna	19 743
Békés	18 385
Nógrád	11 701
Total	3 768 133

With a turnover of 13 billion dollars companies can’t even make it into the 160 largest companies in Europe.

Even in our region there are several companies that reach higher revenues on an annual basis. Apart from the MOL Group, the Czech Skoda and the Polish oil company PKN Orlen belong to this category. A company like Nestle, for example, has an annual turnover more than seven times higher than that amount. Even the profit of big corporate giants would be enough to pay the price of all Hungarian houses and flats for sale several times.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, could buy the entire housing stock on offer almost three times from their annual profit alone.

And Amazon has made so much profit in the last two quarters alone that they could buy almost the whole housing stock currently on the market.

The picture is a little different if we look at not only a week but a whole year. As we learned from ingatlan.com, 11,645 billion forints (about 39 billion dollars) worth of residential properties were advertised on the site in 2020. Although this is a staggering amount, it still lags behind Microsoft’s 2020 profits by 5 billion dollars.

Total value of residential properties for sale (million HUF)

	2018	2019	2020
Capital city	5 444 961	6 966 730	5 626 403
Villages and small towns	1 021 107	1 348 800	1 365 061
Big towns and county seats	1 849 949	2 399 970	2 065 881
Cities	2 208 981	2 848 030	2 587 700
Total	10 524 997	13 563 529	11 645 045

Source: ingatlan.com