Successive governments have been attempting to find ways to help Poles be able to get on the housing ladder, but foreign companies are investing big time in places like the Praga district of Warsaw, which is only accelerating the housing crisis.
The Van der Norm Dutch investment fund has just completed the purchase of 119 such apartments in that Warsaw district, and they will all be turned into rentals. The company is concentrating on funding strategic locations close to underground stations, universities and downtown areas.
The Dutch company is just one example of such practices. There are currently 20 such entities in the Polish market, with capital flowing from Germany, Israel, the U.S., and Scandinavia.
Japan and South African companies are also monitoring the market closely and looking for investment opportunities.
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Such funds have already purchased several thousand apartments in Poland, and it is expected that by 2028 the number of such purchases will be in the region of 90,000 to 100,000.
This decreases the number of apartments available on the market and therefore raises property prices. According to analyst Bartosz Turek, the story in Berlin is instructive, where such funds owned 15 percent of property, but their moves accounted for half of the demand for new apartments, thereby affecting the prices on the market as a whole.
Something similar is happening in the Polish office and warehouse property market. Most of the capital there is foreign-owned, with a majority coming from the U.S. and 16 percent from Europe. Polish capital accounted for just 2 percent of that cake.
As Remix News previously reported this week, Poland’s birth rates have hit a historic low, with a lack of financial security and housing both factors that may be driving the demographic crisis throughout Europe.
