The Swiss Alps ski village that’s luring nervous Americans | USAEMALL.com

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US President Donald Trump seems to be having a big impact on a small ski village in the Swiss Alps. 

In the first few months of this year newly built apartments in the village of Andermatt attracted more than 1,260 enquiries from US investors, with the project’s developer suggesting the demand was fuelled by “a flight to safety” by nervous Americans.

They bought or put down deposits for SFr14.2mn ($17.4mn) worth of apartments by April 10 — nearly double the SFr7.7mn of transactions for the whole of last year. Back in 2023, Andermatt did not have a single American buyer for its new apartments.

More than a third of this year’s sales and deposits were made in the week before Easter as trade tariffs imposed by the Trump administration wreaked havoc in markets. 

Russell Collins, chief commercial officer of Andermatt Swiss Alps, which manages and develops the project and which has sold 546 apartments already built and off-plan, said there had been more US tourism interest since American company Vail Resorts bought a majority stake in the ski resort infrastructure in 2022.

Even so, this year’s surge in US demand was a “clear outlier”, he said. “Since the beginning of the year and in the past six weeks it has been like a hockey stick in terms of sales volume and enquiries,” he said.

Andermatt Swiss Alps, 51 per cent owned by Egyptian-Montenegrin businessman Samih Sawiris and 49 per cent by his company Orascom, is unique in Switzerland because it has been exempted from restrictions on foreign buyers buying property, making it a barometer of foreign demand. 

The SFr1.8bn project in Andermatt, a garrison town known as a training centre for the Swiss army, includes hotels, restaurants and a golf course. It is just a couple of hours by car or train from Zurich.

Buyers say they are looking for safe, Swiss franc-denominated real estate investments because of the uncertainty generated by the new US administration, according to Collins. The Swiss franc has risen 11 per cent since January against the dollar and is up nearly 12 per cent over the past year. 

The boom in Andermatt comes as wealthy Americans both in the US and abroad are drawing up contingency plans to move assets to Switzerland amid uncertainty caused by the Trump administration, the Financial Times reported last month. 

Other European cities such as Madrid are experiencing a rush of “Trump regime refugees” attempting to put down roots. 

Philipp Zünd, a partner at KPMG in Zurich who serves global wealthy clients wanting to move to Switzerland, said the number of Americans who had contacted the firm wanting to take up residency in the country had more than doubled this year compared with previous years’ totals. 

“In the past few months we have seen more Americans wanting to move here and to Europe more broadly,” he said.

In Switzerland, most property purchases by foreign nationals are heavily restricted under the Lex Koller rules. However, the government has exempted Andermatt Swiss Alps due to its size, allowing international buyers to purchase and sell apartments and houses freely, without approval or holding periods.

Additionally, the country’s second-home legislation, which limits the construction of second homes to 20 per cent of a village’s housing stock, does not apply to Andermatt Swiss Alps until 2040. 

Most of Andermatt’s buyers come from the east coast of the US, but are based as far afield as Nebraska and Miami, the company said. 

One Andermatt buyer, a New York-based tech entrepreneur in his early 50s who asked to remain anonymous, said Trump was one of the “main factors” in his decision to buy.

He and his partner purchased a two-bedroom unit for SFr2.2mn in November. Switzerland, he said, was stable and secure at a time when the US was less so under Trump.

“It is not only financial uncertainty — it is not liking what [the US] is turning into and what it has become,” he said. He added that he also moved some funds into a Swiss bank and that he and his partner have taken EU citizenship so that they can live in Switzerland. 

Jeremy Rollason, head of Alpine sales at Savills in London, said Andermatt was “a unique project in Switzerland” and there had been an uptick in its sales, “though I would say the trend of Americans being more interested in foreign real estate started before Trump [was re-elected]”.

He added: “The majority of our buyers in Switzerland are still Europeans but we have seen a threefold increase in the number of US buyer registrations in Europe generally since 2020.”