29 Apr 2026
The canton of Fribourg has 165,870 residential properties, 58% of which are rentals. Yet property portals show barely 2% of this housing stock – a broad overview, certainly, but one that only touches the surface of the reality on the ground. To move from a high-level view to a detailed understanding of the market, the School of Management Fribourg has worked with its partners to developed a unique monitoring tool in Switzerland.
Professor Marilyne Pasquier and research associate Mélanie Vuitel opened their presentation at the first Immo-Connect property event, held in Bulle at the end of April 2026, with an aerial view of the Bulle urban area. While striking, the photograph was insufficient in capturing the complexity of the rental market. There remains a significant gap between traditional data sources and the reality experienced by those working on the ground.
The response from the Housing and Property Monitor for the Canton of Fribourg, led by the School of Management Fribourg as part of a public–private partnership, is to collaborate with property management companies to collect and analyse data directly from the source. The result is more than 40,000 rental records processed each quarter, providing coverage of over 45% of the canton’s rental housing stock, compared with less than 2% for the leading property portals.
Bulle has the highest rent per square metre
The data makes it possible to analyse the rental market with a level of detail that no cantonal average can provide. Three pilot municipalities illustrate this mosaic of local realities.
For a three-room apartment, the average net monthly rent stands at CHF 1,297 in Bulle, CHF 1,289 in Estavayer and CHF 1,248 in Fribourg (31 December 2025). However, the annual rent per square metre for the same type of apartment tells a different story, standing at CHF 202 in Bulle, CHF 198 in Fribourg and CHF 192 in Estavayer. When the ranking is reversed for average net monthly rent, how can one explain Estavayer’s lower rent per square metre in comparison with Fribourg’s? "While nominal rents are comparable, apartments are on average more spacious in Estavayer," explains Pasquier, Executive Officer of the Housing and Property Monitor for the Canton of Fribourg.
The availability rate of rental properties is perhaps the most telling figure. In Bulle it fell from 6.53% (Q4 2021) to 0.33% (Q3 2024) within just a few years. This sharp decline reflects an extremely tight market situation, very different from that observed in the city of Fribourg or in Estavayer. If we look at the entire canton rather than just the three pilot towns included in the Housing and Property Monitor for the Canton of Fribourg’s monitoring program, Villars-sur-Glâne ranks among the three municipalities with the lowest rental availability rates, between Bulle and Fribourg.
The canton’s third-largest town by population, Villars-sur-Glâne is also one of the municipalities where rents are among the highest. The three municipalities with the highest rents for a three-room apartment, in descending order, are Düdingen, Châtel-St-Denis and Villars-sur-Glâne.
Better insight leads to better action
These figures are not produced to simply fill the pages of reports. They are updated every quarter, and are above all intended to support concrete decision-making — whether by setting realistic rents, assessing project risks or anticipating pressures in a local market. They help facilitate dialogue between local authorities, landlords, investors and property management companies.
Measuring data at the source, directly from the rental records of property management companies, means moving beyond a broad, bird’s-eye view to get a grasp of the specific realities on the ground in Fribourg.