Apartments too expensive for Poles living in Poland

Thanks for your input SeanBM, I suppose you can never trust what newspapers tell us nor can you trust how they get their information, I suppose we can gleam from the article is that some Poles are not able to enter the Real Estate market as it is priced beyond their means, this is happening everywhere not only in Poland.

I personally think that Poles are underpaid and that Homes and Apartments are overpriced.
Something will have to give, I don't believe Poles will be taking in more income in the foreseeable future, it could be less with Unemployment on the increase.

I can assure you the 1.000 from the government for having a baby will buy about one set of clothes and two months of baby milk. Its hardly an outrageously high level of benefit and its aimed, quite rightly at the poorer sections of the population.

How many charities are there that could support you indefinitely ? And there are never ending zwolnienie lekarskie but after 3 years your benefits are cut sharply, certainly to the extent that it would be no easy life.

true but free food like milk, flour and sugar etc, are in endless supply.

I also think this is normal for young people at most times.
It is difficult to get a leg up in the real estate market but there are alternatives to living in the centre of cities.
Something that we rarely talk about on PF are the suburbs.
And with the new E.U. funded roads and motorways you can live out of the centre of Krakow for a fraction of the price and have good infrastructure to the centre.

Of course petrol money comes in to this scenario but I am quite happy taking the local private buses that are 4.50PLN for 35 Km in to Krakow from where I am living.

If you look at Krakow and go up to 35Km, from the market square, along the international motorways or newly reconstructed roads like the A1 you can find housing for a fraction of the price.

I think that people here are still not used to having this option yet.

Young people yes, but established working middle class?


As long as the planning is done with common sense, it shouldn't be a problem. For some reason I see huge housing estates with inadequate connections to the cities..

So then it's back to the office for a few weeks, take your 'parent's' days, maybe a week or two more work, then announce you're pregnant again and promptly go off sick. Eventually you will get fired but not for several years.

cms I know how much 1000zl can buy, but do you really think the money is going to go to the kid? 1000zl is enough for some gaudy clothes, a few nights at the local diskoteka, a tv, and crap like that.

and the cycle can be repeated endlessly, then after quit you can go on unemployment because youve been technically unemployed for a two years. than again, find a job, work for a few months, pop out a another kid, and another 2 years of free salary.

The trend seems to be to obtain a plot of land, after 5 years put in foundations to a mansion, after another 5 years put up the walls and roof on this building the size of a hotel, after another 3 years window doors and finish 25% for usable space and let your grandchildren insulate the building.

All the meantime renting or living with family.

It is the same with apartments and finishing them yourself. It is a common practice in ex-commie countries.
For those that don't know: when you buy a new apartment in most ex-commie countries, they don't finish them.
So you get the title deeds, but it is wall to wall concrete, no doors, no toilet, no tiles, no flooring no paint on the walls...nic

People here think it is cheaper if they do it themselves, an uncle who is a plumber, a friend who is "kind of" an electrician and they buy all the materials themselves.

It is cheaper for a developer to buy and install 100 toilets than for 100 individuals to buy and install their own.
I have heard justification for this mentality, that you can have it the way "you want", so we all go down to Castarama and see what choice we have :)

The trend here is for people not to take mortgages but do it all themselves, so after many years you get a half finished house or apartment in many cases. A work in progress.


Yes, general plans are a general pain.
And I have seen houses up mud driveways with silage tanks and dodgy looking electrics (his friend again;) and I wonder how you are supposed to do this midwinter.

It is changing though, the workforce coming from the country and working in the cities have left their families homes and take mortgages.

On the note of Polish mortgages, isn't Poland one of the lowest mortgage takers in Europe? it may have changed but I doubt it.

Knowing the realities in Poland and having some family who lived 10-15km from the center of city, man... unless you really need a huge f'ing house and an illusion of peace and quiet, all the negatives like the daily traffic grind which is brutal, absolutely brutal, the lack of ANY nearby amenities and everything requires a long ass drive, the lack of paved roads. Thats why I see gated communities are becoming really popular nowadays.

It does seem low, but growing rapidly.
hypo.org/Content/Default.asp?PageID=202

The following seems to make perfect sense as well:
housingfinance.org/uploads/Publicationsmanager/Poland.pdf


It kind of brings together what Avalon has been saying, and what I've been saying :)

I think there will be a huge boom in housing if it becomes more affordable.

I do understand that point of view. When I bought my apartment I was entirely uninterested in what was inside it and cared only about the neighbours and the neighbourhood. The entire flat went out of the window and the windows followed. Then it was all the way that I wanted it to be.

Although I didn't do it proper Polish style, the whole thing was done in 16 days, not the traditional Polish 'take a year of doing it on saturdays and really **** the neighbours off' routine.

The sizes of the houses are ginormous in comparison to Ireland. When i go back and see the bungalows it is most obvious.
But you don't have to buy a huge house.


I have peace and quite where I live, beside a huge forest, up the Beskidy mountains.
Too much actually, I am a city boy, the country life is not for me full time, I am planning on moving.


I have yet to talk to people who do not complain about traffic anywhere.


Again, I don't have this problem at all, everything is near where I live 35km south of Krakow. And there are many other places like the town I live in around Krakow.


I think this is where we differ, I was talking about living in towns 35Km around Krakow (I should have said).
These estates with gates are growing up all over the place, with little to no infrastructure and amenities.
I would not call them ''gated communities'' even though you have a point because it reminds me of south Africa or Jamica, where this term means something very different.


Any more recent figures? that's 2007 and things have changed. I have been looking for it myself but can't find anything up to date.

But it does show the past trend and the new one.

Edit*


This annoys the hell out of me.

So you have just bought a flat, you finish but other people haven't. For the next year, the hallways, lifts and all common areas get destroyed from all builders banging everything off all the walls (I believe it is mandatory), the constant sound of drilling, hammering, dragging, the chaos is enough to drive you up the wall.

I'd be interested to see some new info as well...

Maybe the reason the new places are finished so slowly is because people run out of money?
In Caribbean you see this a lot - two houses next to each other - one old, where family lives, and the other one in various stages of construction. The reason is that owners cannot get loans, so they save up for a year or so, then buy another load of bricks. The new construction takes years to finish.

It's not constant, it's only at the times when people aren't at work!

House Hunting in ... Poland

nytimes.com/2010/02/10/greathomesanddestinations/10gh-househunting.html

A TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN LODZ'S CITY CENTER

910,000 POLISH ZLOTYS ($306,000)

This 130-square-meter (1,399-square-foot) apartment is on the second floor of a three-story tenement building built in 1923. Staircases and other portions of the indoor common areas are original and have been restored recently.

Poland shows signs of real estate recovery

For central and eastern Europe's crisis-hit property markets, the year could not have had a better start.

In the biggest regional property deal since 2007, MGPA, a real estate company backed by Australia's Macquarie Group, last month acquired two Polish shopping centres and took an option to buy a third for more than €235m ($341m).

For investors it is evidence of a recovery that began late last year, following a revival in west European prime commercial property and gains in global financial markets.

Why did you even post that happymeal? I mean what the NYT or FT are some kind of expert opinion here? The Lodz apartment blurb is a fcking joke, the entire city of Lodz is imploding and that thing is grossly overpriced, and the FTs article is actually negative as hell.

no need for this type of language on this forum, what are you trying to say? The housing/real estate market is what people are prepared to pay for a property, have you got actual figures of what prices have been paid for homes/apartments, not the advertised price?

HAHAHAHA....oh man...I swear there was non stop noise for the whole year of 2009 in my building. From 6am to 10pm every...f'ing day. In fact when I left they were STILL banging and drilling and making noise.

I began playing the TV and music loud all night (I am a night person) and slamming every door and cabinet I could. If they were going to ruin my day I was going to ruin their night ;)

Of course I dont have any actual figures, who am I some property guru? Im a bum just like you on polishforums.com posting because Im bored. But you have to be retard not to realize how bad things are in Lodz, just today in a special referendum a stunning 95% voted to dismiss the city's mayor.

Im more interested in where the hell you came from and why youve vested so much interest in my post... lemme guess, another island speculator desperately trying to unload a bunch of overinflated **** they bought in late 2008?

One british guy who bought few apartments in 2007 in Wroclaw, cutted down the prices, just to sell them now in 2009 but:

- he cutted the prices already by 40% loss, and still NOBODY is buying
- he said that all statistics in newspapers are LIES, because the market will go down another minus 50% before somebody actually starts buying apartments in Poland

It was bad in 2010, but it's even worse now.

The average price in Warsaw is now pushing 11,000zł/m2, while provincial cities aren't much better. I've seen one report suggesting that prices broke the 10,000zł/m2 barrier in Gdańsk, and even in Nowa Huta in Kraków, you can pay over 8,000zł/m2.

How can an average Polish family ever hope to pay this kind of price?

Just like in the West - they take mortgage.

Yes, despite the pandemic prices soared by 10% within the last year. Amazing. That`s partly a result of higher inflation after the government`s injections into locked economy.

Yup, combined with interest rates being cut to nothing.