Purchase process and costs

Every Austrian purchase begins, or should begin, with the land register (Grundbuch) — a court-kept public register to which everybody has full access. An electronic extract, obtainable in minutes for a small fee, shows the registered owner, the exact plot, and every registered burden: mortgages, easements and rights of way, rights of use, pre-emption rights, pending proceedings. Because registration is constitutive — a registrable right comes into existence only when it is entered — a clean extract is worth more than any assurance from a seller. It is not the whole picture, though: an existing tenancy binds the buyer even though leases are almost never registered, so an experienced adviser will check the tenancy position as well as the collection of deeds behind the entries and the zoning position with the municipality.

The register's public character cuts both ways: once you own, your ownership is equally visible. Families who prefer distance between their name and their address sometimes hold through a company or foundation instead — a trade-off with real tax consequences, weighed on the page on ownership structures and rental income.

The land-register entry is not paperwork after the fact — it is the transfer. Until registration, the buyer has a contractual claim; only with it does ownership pass. Before the application can be filed, the real-estate transfer tax and registration fee are handled — in practice self-assessed and paid through the transaction lawyer or notary — and any approvals are attached. The court then processes the application and the new ownership appears on the public record.

For a straightforward resale apartment with no financing complications, six to ten weeks from agreed deal to land-register application is a typical overall timeline (typical, not guaranteed). Land-transfer approval for a third-country buyer, a mortgage bank's own timetable, or a new build's completion schedule each add their own weeks or months — which is why the property purchase belongs inside the wider relocation timeline rather than bolted on at the end.

Austrian banks lend to new residents, but the file matters more than it does for a settled local. Since the binding mortgage-lending regulation lapsed at the end of June 2025, supervisory guidance has carried its benchmarks forward as expectations rather than law (as of 2026): a loan of at most about 90% of the collateral value — which, with transaction costs on top, means roughly 20% of the total outlay in own funds — debt service within about 40% of net income, and terms of no more than 35 years. Banks may deviate where their risk management supports it — which, for wealthy newcomers, is precisely where the conversation happens. Lending is in euros; the foreign-currency mortgages of an earlier era are effectively unavailable to private borrowers.

What banks want to see from someone freshly arrived is an Austrian anchor: income taxed here, assets held or moving here, or an existing private-banking relationship. In practice many high-net-worth purchases are financed against the portfolio rather than the property — Lombard credit from the private bank that holds the securities, sometimes alongside a conventional mortgage. That conversation folds into the wider account-opening and evidence-of-wealth process described under banking and finance for new residents. Where a mortgage is registered, budget the 1.2% registration fee above, charged on the maximum amount entered rather than on the loan alone — and note that financing is one more reason to fix the purchase late, not early, in the moving sequence.