Your situation
Relocated for work
A new post, a new city, and a start date you did not choose. Your Geneva lease keeps its own calendar, and the two rarely line up on their own.
A date set by someone else
Relocations tend to arrive already decided. A team is being moved, a role has opened in another office, a project needs you on site by a given Monday. The date comes down from above, it is often close, and it is usually not open to discussion. Everything else in your life then has to be arranged around it, in whatever time is left.
The flat is the item on that list with the longest lead time and the least flexibility. You can pack a household in a fortnight. You cannot make a lease end in a fortnight simply because your employer needs you elsewhere. That mismatch, not the move itself, is what turns an ordinary relocation into an expensive one.
Two calendars that do not match
Your professional calendar has one date on it: the day you are expected at the new desk. Your lease has a different set of dates entirely — a fixed term, a notice period counted in months, and, in many Geneva leases, specific dates in the year on which an ordinary termination may take effect. Read together, the two calendars usually leave a gap in which you are living in one city and paying rent in another.
That gap is not a technicality. Every month of it is a full month of rent and running costs on a flat nobody is using, paid on top of whatever you are paying at the other end. Our guide to notice periods sets out how the dates are worked out, so that you can see the size of your own gap before deciding what to do about it.
How a lease takeover closes the gap
Swiss law does not require you to sit out the notice period. UnderArticle 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. The lease continues, on the same conditions, with a different name on it. Yours comes off.
In practice this replaces the long calendar with a short one. Instead of waiting for a term that may still be a long way off, the file moves at the speed of the search and the landlord's decision. The point is not that it is instant — we do not promise a date, and nobody honestly can — but that your liability ends when the successor takes over rather than when the contract happens to expire.
It also has to be done properly. If a candidate you put forward fails the solvency check, the procedure begins again from the start with a fresh month of notice. One weak application costs a month of rent, which on a relocation is money you are already spending twice.What goes in a tenant file explains what a managing agent looks at before saying yes.
Ask your employer what is covered
Relocation packages vary widely from one employer to another, and between grades or contract types within the same organisation. Some cover removal costs, temporary accommodation or administrative assistance; some do not. We have no way of knowing what applies to you, and nor does a colleague's experience.
It is worth asking, in writing, before you commit to anything: what your employer will cover, what evidence they need, and whether anything has to be approved in advance. The answer costs one email and occasionally covers a meaningful part of the move. Where a cost is not covered, knowing that early is just as useful.
What we take off your desk
A relocation is already a second job. The part of it that concerns the flat is the part we can absorb entirely: writing the file, arranging professional photographs, publishing the listing on the Geneva property portals, receiving and sorting the applications, verifying each candidate before anyone reaches your inbox, running the viewings ourselves, and presenting the qualified candidates to the managing agent.
You keep your evenings and your weekends, and you do not show your kitchen to strangers while you are trying to hand over a role. We look at your file within 24 hours of receiving it, and we stay on it through to the exit inventory and the release of your lease.How it works sets out the sequence, and thelease takeover page carries the form that starts it.
No fee for the outgoing tenant when we find the successor, in exchange for two weeks of exclusivity. Is it really free explains why.
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.