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.
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.