Buying a house in Sweden

What's a house?

An apartment is just an apartment (lägenhet), but with houses you've got various kinds of property:

• villa — just a house on a small plot of land, maybe with a garage
• radhus, kedjehus, parhus — raw house, i.e. a house joined to another one by the side wall; usually with extremely small plot of land due to obvious reasons. My husband calls this “all the downsides of having neighbors like in an apartment plus all the downsides of maintaining your own house”, but other people find it cozy
• gård — this is more of a farmhouse; there's usually more land and also other buildings, like a barn and such
• fritidshus — vacation home, usually smaller and quite often not meant to be lived in during winters.

For gårdar it's important to check their taxation code. If it's 220, everything works as usual. If it's “typkod 120” or if they just write “jordbruk”, that's a bit of a different story, you're basically buying an enterprise and some banks might decline you mortgage based on that. Others don't have a problem with it at all and almost specialize in these.