Statistics Poland\u2019s figures after February on housing starts suggested a clear slowdown, but March brought a dramatic turnaround. Across all categories of activity in residential construction, the March data point to better results than a year earlier. The real driving force behind the market turned out to be households. The number of home construction projects launched by them surged by as much as 144% month on month. The question is whether this impulse will prove to be the start of a more lasting trend. The situation is commented on by Katarzyna Kuniewicz, Head of Research at Otodom.<\/p>\n
The latest data from Statistics Poland on the scale of residential construction in Poland show that the number of apartments and houses completed in March was 8.9% higher than in February and 3.1% higher year on year. Quarterly results are less optimistic. In the January\u2013March 2026 period, only 45,200 apartments and houses were completed across Poland, marking the weakest first-quarter result in eight years. The last time Statistics Poland recorded fewer than 46,000 units completed in the first quarter was in 2018.<\/p>\n
In March, all investor groups completed a total of 15,900 housing units. Of this total, developers were responsible for nearly 9,000 apartments, which represents a 5.3% increase compared with February, but at the same time a level 4% lower than in March last year. This slight year-on-year decline suggests not only a single weaker monthly result, but also makes forecasts more plausible according to which 2026 will be the weakest year in eight years in terms of the number of homes completed. It is worth remembering, however, that in 2024 Statistics Poland recorded the launch of nearly 153,000 developer-built apartments and houses. That reading was one of the highest in the history of Poland\u2019s development market, surpassed only in 2021, when it reached 163,000. This is why the relatively low number of homes completed in the first quarter of this year is surprising.<\/p>\n
Developers accounted for 56% of all residential units completed in March. The results of individual investors are more stable than those of developers, and their share in total residential construction in Poland in 2025 stood at 33% of all completed units. Both in March and in the first quarter of this year, the share of households in Poland\u2019s total residential construction reached a record 40%. Compared with March 2025, individual investors, referred to as households in Statistics Poland\u2019s terminology, completed 10.4% more houses and apartments, while compared with the previous month their result was 7.3% higher.<\/p>\n
The month-on-month increase in the number of units completed by developers is not confirmed by cumulative year-to-date data on completed housing units. In the January\u2013March period, developers delivered 26,100 apartments and houses for use, clearly fewer than a year earlier, when the figure stood at 27,700.<\/p>\n
Over the same period, individual investors completed 17,900 units, or 6% more than in the corresponding period of 2025.<\/p>\n
The efforts of various investor groups to obtain building permits in March produced much better results than in February and were close to the levels recorded in March 2024.<\/p>\n
Aggregated data for the past 36 months show that the surplus of residential building permits obtained by developers over the number of construction projects launched in comparable periods remains high. As a result, developers retain considerable flexibility in deciding when to bring new supply to market.<\/p>\n
The total number of permits issued in March reached 27,200, including 18,500 obtained by developers and 8,300 by individual investors. As a result, the total number of permits issued in March was 20% higher than in February. Compared with last year, the figure also rose significantly, by 20.5%. The source of these impressive increases was not only the strong activity of developers, but also that of households.<\/p>\n
The upward trend is also visible on a quarterly basis. The number of residential units for which various investor groups obtained permits in the January\u2013March period was higher than a year ago. In the first three months of this year, developers obtained permits to build a total of 45,900 apartments and houses, up 11% year on year, while individual investors secured permits for 20,600 units, up 13% year on year.<\/p>\n
March statistics from Statistics Poland on housing starts across the country point to a dynamic rebound compared with February. The scale of the increase suggests that this activity reflects not only the usual seasonal spring upturn, but also a return of optimism in residential construction.<\/p>\n
In March 2026, all investor groups launched the construction of 22,900 residential units, which was 62% more than in February and 5% more than in March 2025. This modest year-on-year increase in the total category was above all the result of strong activity by individual investors, who in March began the construction of 18.6% more units than a year earlier.<\/p>\n
After February, Statistics Poland\u2019s housing-start figures for the whole country had suggested a clear slowdown. However, the sharp rise in the number of new projects launched in March by all investor groups changes these pessimistic forecasts. Admittedly, the results for the first quarter of 2026 are still 11% weaker than those recorded a year earlier, but the improvement compared with February is very clear. Importantly, the activity of households had a stronger impact than in previous months on the overall number of construction starts. In March, households initiated as many as 43% of all housing starts.<\/p>\n
The current Statistics Poland data on housing starts should also be interpreted in the context of building permit statistics. Since the beginning of the year, the gap between the number of permits obtained and the number of projects launched has amounted to 18,200, which means that 27% of the permits issued have not yet translated into actual construction activity.<\/p>\n
At the same time, it is worth noting that four-fifths of this surplus, or 15,000 permits, was generated by permits for new apartments, because developers postponed the launch of one in three permits obtained in the first quarter. In the category of individual investors, the share of postponed permits is half that level.<\/p>\n
The performance of developers in the context of the surplus of permits over construction starts should be assessed somewhat differently from that of households. This is mainly because permits obtained by developers often concern multi-phase projects comprising hundreds of apartments. By contrast, households usually obtain a permit for a single building, typically a single-family home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Statistics Poland\u2019s figures after February on housing starts suggested a clear slowdown, but March brought a dramatic turnaround. Across all categories of activity in residential construction, the March data point to better results than a year earlier. The real driving force behind the market turned out to be households. The number of home construction projects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3555,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[2783,2690,3602,3603,64,2692],"class_list":["post-4977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-real-estate","tag-contrast","tag-gap","tag-katarzyna-kuniewicz","tag-otodom","tag-poland","tag-sharp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceo.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}