Poland’s residential market: Considerable potential versus bureaucratic obstacles

With a transaction volume of €14 billion, the real estate investment market in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) hit a new all-time high in 2019, according to JLL. Although the subsequent year also saw the markets in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia suffer a distinct COVID-19 shock and a heavy decline in transaction volumes, the Polish market displayed the most stability of those four regions — and not just in the industrial and logistics sectors. In 2020, the Polish multifamily residential real estate market attained a solid result with an overall transaction volume of €260 million, which was more than twice the average four-year figure for the years 2015 to 2018.

Nevertheless, compared with the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region, it is still an absolute niche market for professional real estate investors, with institutional investors currently only accounting for about 1 percent of market activity — a figure that contrasts starkly with the