When Anikó Woods and her husband were looking to buy a vacation home close to Lake Balaton in central Hungary, finding even a modest, rural place within their budget was difficult.
It was 2022, during what Woods described as the "height of the pandemic-era property boom." Hungarians flocked to the shores and uplands around Lake Balaton — central Europe's largest freshwater lake — sending prices rocketing.
The couple widened their search area and eventually bought a former winehouse where grapes had been stored and pressed, close to the town of Sümeg in the Balaton Highlands about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) north of the lake.
Fast-forward a few years and property prices remain high, with the average transaction value of a vacation home reaching 744,000 Hungarian forints (about $2,303) per square meter in 2025 — an almost fourfold increase on 2018's price of less than 200,000 forints per square meter, according to data from real estate brokerage Otthon Centrum.
Why Lake Balaton?
Vacationing around the nearly 200km shoreline of Lake Balaton has been popular with Hungarians for generations. During the Communist era of 1949-1989, when international travel was tightly restricted, it served as the ultimate working-class escape, where trade unions provided members and their families with heavily subsidized, affordable holiday lodgings.
As Hungary is landlocked, the lake is sometimes known as the country's internal sea, measuring nearly 80km long and about 14km wide at its widest point. Balatonfüred, one of its most popular vacation towns, is a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Budapest.
While the southern shores are famous for family-friendly beaches, parts of the northern coast have evolved into what some dub the "Hamptons of Hungary." According to Woods, who runs the website How To Hungary, this scenic northern stretch is highly sought after for its "expensive second homes, excellent restaurants, vineyards, sailing and a recognizable summer social scene.
Head to Tihany, a peninsula on the lake's north shore, and you might pay as much as 2.45 million euros (about $2.78 million) for an apartment with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, according to a September listing on Sotheby's website. Otthon Centrum analyst Gábor Soóki-Tóth said Tihany is one of the most expensive places in Hungary to buy a vacation property — with prices outstripping those in the nation's capital.
Sotheby's described the upscale villas around Lake Balaton as a "prime opportunity" for investment, with "opulent" estates available "often at a fraction of the cost of comparable properties in more established, albeit less unique, European luxury markets.
Stalled projects
But it's a nuanced picture. Prices are cooling from the highs of 2025, with the average transaction value of a holiday home around Lake Balaton currently around 712,000 Hungarian forints per square meter, down 4.3% on last year, according to Otthon Centrum.
While a scarcity of waterfront and panoramic plots and the increasing number of high-end developments in Balatonfüred and other lakeside towns are pushing prices upward, higher financing costs and a growing supply of new apartments are moderating the trend, said Soóki-Tóth.
Challenging market conditions mean construction is yet to start at Grand Balaton, an upscale residential development in Balatonakarattya at the eastern end of the lake, about an hour's drive from central Budapest.
Grand Balaton | The Greypixel
Spread across 25,000 square meters, plans for the site include 100 apartments priced between about 135 million and 419 million Hungarian forints, with access to gardens, a swimming pool, wellness and fitness areas and a co-working space. Buildings are designed to stay below the level of the tree canopy, while parking will be underground, meaning the development will be largely car-free.
Some Grand Balaton plots have already been reserved, but development director Gabor Kadas said it's unclear when construction can begin. "We have every permit. We are ready to start the project when the market conditions are right," he said. And, as is the case in other parts of Europe, the real estate market in Hungary is cyclical. "These days, we are not on the sunny side of the cycle," Kadas said.
Local life
In August, the Hungarian government moved against two private luxury developments around the lake, saying it would terminate their national economic priority status and give locals more of a voice in the future, according to a translation of comments by national assembly speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer on Facebook. The priority status allows developers to bypass local regulatory plans, according to Soóki-Tóth. "I expect that some of these projects will be completely stopped as a result of removing the designation," he said.
For Gabriella Weisz, who has run real estate agency BalatonHomes for 15 years, some of the area around Balatonfüred is like a "little Monaco," with its mix of four- and five-star hotels, golf clubs, and activities like horse riding. But she said locals are being priced out. "It's almost a switch in people who live here. They are more like Budapest families — the husband is a lawyer, they moved here with their children, and he goes back to Budapest to work," Weisz said.
Woods and her husband split their time between a small apartment in Budapest and their Balaton winehouse. There's a different kind of life for locals around the lake, she said, in comparison to the activities that attract well-off tourists. Some areas remain more traditional. "People grow grapes, cut wood, maintain their land and worry about the weather," she said.
