Your situation
Moving abroad before your lease ends
You are leaving Switzerland for good, and the lease on your Geneva flat still has months to run. Here is what changes, and what has to be settled before you board the plane.
Leaving the country is not moving across town
A move within Geneva leaves you nearby. You can go back for a viewing, sign a document at the counter, meet the managing agent on the landing. A move abroad removes all of that at once: from the moment your flight leaves, every step of the handover happens without you in the room, in an administrative culture you are on your way out of.
Meanwhile the lease carries on exactly as before. It runs to its term, and the rent and the running costs stay charged to whoever signed it, even once that person is on another continent and no longer has the keys. Paying for an empty flat from abroad is the outcome this page exists to avoid.
This is a takeover, not a sublet
The distinction decides everything that follows. A sublet keeps the lease in your name: you remain the landlord's tenant, you remain liable for the rent, and you answer for whoever is living there. That suits someone spending a year away and coming back. It makes very little sense for someone who is not.
A lease takeover ends your relationship with the flat. 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 it over on the same terms, whom the landlord cannot reasonably refuse. Once that successor is accepted and the handover is complete, your obligations stop. Our guide tothree ways out of your lease sets the two options against each other.
The list nobody hands you on the way out
The lease is the largest item on a departure list, not the only one. These have to line up in the same few weeks, and each is harder once you are abroad.
- Notice. The takeover does not replace your formal notice; the dates have to agree. Our guide tonotice periods explains how they are calculated.
- The exit inventory of fixtures. The appointment at which the condition of every room is recorded, and which decides how the rest ends.What happens at the final walk-throughcovers it.
- The deposit. A blocked account in your name that will not release itself.Getting your deposit back explains why a foreign address complicates it.
- Supply contracts. Electricity and any other account in your name has to be closed, with a final reading and a final invoice that has to reach you somewhere.
- A forwarding address. Swiss post keeps arriving at the flat unless it is redirected, and some of it matters.
- Being reachable. An email address and a telephone that answers abroad, given to everyone who will need them. This is what separates a file that closes from one that stalls.
Someone on the ground once you have gone
This is what makes a departure abroad different from every other situation on this site. The flat still has to be shown, the applications checked, the candidates put in front of the managing agent, and someone still has to open the door on the day of the exit inventory. None of that stops because you have left the country.
We can stand in your place for those steps: we hold the keys, run the viewings, deal with the managing agent directly and attend the appointments at the flat, keeping you informed by email in your own time zone. You do not fly back for a half-hour appointment, and you do not hand your keys to a friend who has never done this.
What we take on when the departure is permanent
We start from your dates and work backwards. The file is written, the flat is photographed by a professional, the listing goes out on the Geneva property portals, and the responses come to us. We check who is behind each one — income, debt enforcement register extract, residence permit, a complete application form — before anyone is proposed. A candidate who fails the solvency check sends the procedure back to the start with a fresh month of notice, and from abroad that month is pure loss.
We then present the qualified candidates to the managing agent and stay on the file through to the exit inventory and the release of your lease. Thelease takeover page lists the stages in order and carries the form that starts the process.
No fee for the outgoing tenant when we find the successor, in exchange for two weeks of exclusivity. The reasoning is set out 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.