Despite Zurich’s housing shortage and fierce competition for available flats, one landlord is bucking the general trend of giving preferential treatment to Swiss citizens.
In the ad for his 70 m/2, 2.5-room apartment, landlord Enrico Zingg emphasised that he prefers to rent it to foreigners.
Zingg said the wording was deliberate and based on his own experience as an Italian immigrant. When he arrived in Switzerland as a youth and looked for accommodation, he found that landlords “only wanted to rent to Swiss nationals.”
That was many years ago (Zingg is now 68) and although such adverts are no longer legal (read more about this below) they left a lasting impression on him.
He said that even today, when such discrimination is no longer allowed, foreigners continue to face disadvantages in the Swiss housing market.
“Many have to settle for much poorer-quality housing,” he pointed out.
Therefore, as a property owner, Zingg prefers to rent to immigrants: “This is my contribution to universal justice,” he said.
Do foreign nationals really face difficulties in the rental market?
Even though discriminatory content is not allowed on rental platforms and such ads are systematically deleted, they sometimes do pop up.
Tacit forms of discrimination still exist in practice as well.
In 2025, the Federal Housing Administration (FOH) confirmed that apartment seekers with foreign names are allowed to view properties less often than those with typically Swiss names, even though property management companies can’t exclude candidates on the basis of nationality or ethnic background.
READ MORE: How foreign tenants in Switzerland face discrimination when flat hunting
And that brings up another valid point: isn’t targeting rentals to just one group – in this case, foreigners – to the exclusion of Swiss citizens, legal?
In public housing it absolutely isn’t.
Private landlords like Zingg, on the other hand, have some contractual freedom to choose their tenants.
However, advertising this preference on public forums like real estate platforms is clearly not allowed, as it constitutes ‘reverse’ discrimination.
Publishing a rental listing restricted to a national group violates anti-discrimination standards and platform terms, just as rejecting an applicant merely due to their national origin is illegal.
In his ad, Zingg marked ‘Foreigners Preferred’ instead of ‘Foreigners Only,’ so it remains to be seen whether – despite his quest for justice – such an ad passes the legal muster.
