Your situation
End of an international assignment in Geneva
Your posting is coming to an end and the flat has to be dealt with. This page tells you what to check, where the official answer lives, and what we can take on.
The end of a posting is not an ordinary move
International civil servants, NGO staff and their families leave Geneva on a rhythm the local housing market does not follow. A contract ends, a mandate is not renewed, a reassignment arrives, and the date is fixed by the mission rather than by anything happening in the flat. Often the whole household leaves at once, and the move has to be closed from a distance.
The flat is the least dramatic part of that departure and the one that lingers longest. A Geneva lease runs to a fixed term and does not end because a posting has: the rent and the running costs remain due from whoever signed, whether or not that person is still on the continent.
Some leases carry clauses written for international postings
Leases signed by staff on international assignment sometimes contain provisions that do not appear in an ordinary tenancy: a clause tied to the end of a mission, or a particular way of terminating when a posting is cut short. Such clauses are commonly referred to as a diplomatic clause, and their content varies from one contract to another.
We will not tell you what yours says or what it entitles you to. We have not read your lease, no two are drafted alike, and repeating a duration picked up second-hand would be worse than saying nothing. Locate the clause first: its presence or absence changes the route you take.
Read your own contract, and put the question to the housing or welcome service attached to your organisation. They deal with these clauses constantly and know the arrangements that apply to your status. Their answer is the one that counts for your file; nothing on an agency website, this one included, is a substitute for it.
Where to check the rule that applies to you
Three places, in this order. Your lease, the document that governs your own situation. Your organisation's housing or welcome service, which can read it in the light of your status. And the official sources at the foot of this page, which set out the general law and the guidance published for international residents in Geneva.
Where those sources and your contract appear to disagree, or where the wording is not clear to you, take legal advice rather than settling on an interpretation of your own. What the contract says has consequences you will be living with from another country.
If the clause does not apply, or you would rather not rely on it
Plenty of departing staff find that their lease contains no such clause, that the one it contains does not cover their circumstances, or that the dates it produces still leave rent to pay on an empty flat. The ordinary route out of a Swiss lease is open in all three.
Under Article 264 of the Swiss Code of Obligations, a tenant who returns the property before the end of the lease is released from it by presenting a solvent successor, willing to take over the lease on the existing terms, whom the landlord cannot reasonably refuse. That mechanism does not depend on your status, your employer or the wording of any special clause.Leaving your lease early in Genevasets out the procedure.
What we do for departing international staff
We know this departure well, because we handle it repeatedly. Our part is the search and the procedure: the file, the professional photographs, the listing on the Geneva property portals, the screening of each application against what a managing agent will actually check, the viewings, the presentation of qualified candidates, and the follow-through to the exit inventory. We work in English, and we can act on the ground once you have left.
Our part is not to interpret your status or your organisation's rules. When a question falls on that side of the line we say so and send you back to your housing service. To start with a conversation rather than a form, use the contact page; if your dates are fixed, the lease takeover page collects everything we need to assess the case.
No fee for the outgoing tenant when we find the successor, in exchange for two weeks of exclusivity. Details onis it really free.
Hand over your lease with a team that does it every week
Tell us about your flat and your move-out date. We handle your file within 24 hours. When we find your incoming tenant, the service costs you nothing.