Where are home prices in Warsaw heading next?

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Where are home prices in Warsaw heading next?

Warsaw home prices are currently heading toward modest growth, with roughly 3% to 5% nominal appreciation over the next year looking more plausible than either a 10% correction or another double-digit surge.

The latest numbers leave surprisingly little support for a crash. AMRON-SARFiN recorded Warsaw transaction prices rising almost 4% quarter over quarter and about 6.5% year over year in Q2. Mortgage lending has recovered sharply, Warsaw wages are growing around 6% to 7% annually, and unemployment remains extremely low.

At the same time, developers have plenty of homes to sell. CBRE counted 16,345 new apartments available at the end of Q2, including 3,344 that were already completed. BIG DATA RynekPierwotny.pl then recorded two consecutive monthly declines in the average developer asking price, taking it to PLN 19,568 per square metre.

Those declines deserve attention, but the median new-build price was still PLN 17,400 per square metre and 5% higher than a year earlier. Much of the recent drop in the average came from cheaper projects entering the market rather than widespread reductions on existing apartments.

We therefore see Warsaw moving into a slower phase where wages can catch up with property prices and buyers can negotiate again. Some apartments will become cheaper, especially weak resale listings and completed developer stock. Good apartments in well-connected districts can keep getting more expensive at the same time.

Are Warsaw apartment prices actually starting to fall?

Warsaw apartment prices are showing some monthly weakness now, but we still cannot call this a genuine citywide correction.

BIG DATA RynekPierwotny.pl recorded the average asking price of a new Warsaw apartment falling for two months in a row. It first slipped from nearly PLN 19,900 per square metre to around PLN 19,800, then fell another 1% to PLN 19,568.

The explanation underneath the second decline is unusually important. A larger batch of relatively affordable apartments entered Warsaw’s developer market at an average of roughly PLN 16,400 per square metre. Those cheaper additions pulled down the citywide average even when developers left the prices of older listings unchanged.

CBRE had already found a similar shift during Q2. Apartments introduced in new projects averaged PLN 18,593 per square metre, 8.6% below the previous quarter’s newly launched supply. More development was arriving outside Warsaw’s expensive core.

The median gives us another check. RynekPierwotny.pl currently puts the median new-build asking price at PLN 17,400 per square metre, still 5% higher than a year earlier. A broad correction would normally show weakness across comparable homes and transaction prices too, and we are not seeing that yet.

So the recent monthly declines are real, but narrower than the headline suggests. Warsaw buyers are getting access to a cheaper mix of apartments before they are getting large cuts on the same apartments.

Has Warsaw’s housing boom already ended?

Yes, Warsaw’s previous housing boom has ended, even though apartment prices can still keep rising from here.

During the strongest part of the previous cycle, Warsaw recorded annual new-home transaction-price increases above 20% in National Bank of Poland data. Buyers were dealing with rapidly rising prices, limited choice and a government-supported mortgage program that pushed a large amount of demand into the market at once.

That environment has disappeared. Early this year, AMRON-SARFiN put Warsaw’s average transaction price at PLN 15,104 per square metre, down 0.9% from the previous quarter. Q2 then produced a strong rebound of almost 4%.

The sequence is more interesting than either quarter on its own. Warsaw went from a small quarterly decline to a sizeable quarterly increase without returning to the shortage conditions that defined the boom. Developers still had more than 16,000 apartments for sale at the end of Q2.

That points to a healthier but much slower market. A few quarters of 3% to 6% annual price growth would look completely different from the earlier period when annual increases could move above 20%.

The boom is behind us. The question now is whether Warsaw settles into slow appreciation or whether improving credit eventually starts another acceleration.

Do Warsaw developers have too many apartments to sell?

Warsaw developers currently have enough apartments to keep price growth under control, and the large stock of completed homes gives buyers more leverage than they had during the boom.

CBRE counted 16,345 apartments available from developers at the end of Q2, up 7.1% in only three months. Developers launched 4,753 new units during the quarter while selling 3,840, so supply increased faster than demand.

The completed stock deserves even more attention. CBRE found 3,344 finished but unsold apartments, representing 20.5% of all developer inventory. That means roughly one apartment in five on the developer market could already be handed over to a buyer.

Some of that number is harmless because projects naturally add completed units when construction finishes. More interesting are the several hundred apartments completed around the end of last year that remained unsold months later. Those homes tie up developer capital and become natural candidates for negotiations, finishing packages, parking discounts or other incentives.

Yet Warsaw is still selling apartments at a healthy pace. The 3,840 homes sold in Q2 were 4.6% above the five-year quarterly average of about 3,670.

The current inventory looks heavy rather than distressed. It should make another sudden price explosion difficult, while giving developers little reason to launch aggressive citywide markdowns.

Are buyers coming back to Warsaw’s housing market?

Yes, buyers are coming back to Warsaw and Poland’s housing market, especially through mortgages, although the latest numbers suggest recovery rather than another buying frenzy.

AMRON-SARFiN recorded more than 83,000 new Polish housing loans in Q2 with a total value of PLN 39.7 billion. Loan volumes increased 14.3% from Q1 and were about 50% above the same quarter a year earlier. The value of new lending rose even faster.

BIK’s latest reading also remains positive. The value of mortgage applications was 9.3% higher than a year earlier, while 7% more people applied for a housing loan. The average requested mortgage reached PLN 525,700, up 7.2%.

There is one useful warning inside those numbers. Applicant numbers fell 14.4% from July. Seasonality plays a role, and BIK itself expects annual growth rates to become less spectacular as comparisons become tougher.

We should also avoid treating every new mortgage as a new home purchase. AMRON previously found that refinancing had become a meaningful part of the lending recovery.

Even after those adjustments, financing conditions clearly look stronger than they did a year ago. That makes a broad Warsaw price decline harder to achieve because more households can once again compete for apartments.

Will lower mortgage rates push Warsaw home prices back up?

Lower mortgage rates should keep supporting Warsaw home prices, and they are probably the biggest reason the market can rise despite having plenty of supply.

Poland’s reference rate has fallen materially from the 5.75% level that prevailed through much of 2024. By mid-2026 it stood at 3.75%, following roughly two percentage points of easing since spring 2025.

For Warsaw buyers, that change goes straight into affordability. Lower rates mean a household can borrow more with the same income or make a smaller monthly payment on the same loan. The strong recovery in mortgage lending shows that households are already responding.

But cheaper credit is arriving in a market with more than 16,000 developer apartments available. Buyers have somewhere to direct that extra purchasing power without immediately bidding against one another for every decent unit.

There is also no equivalent today of the previous subsidized mortgage program concentrating thousands of purchases into a short period.

That should make this rate cycle much less explosive. Lower rates can keep Warsaw prices moving upward while the existing inventory absorbs much of the extra demand.

Are Warsaw salaries finally catching up with apartment prices?

Yes, Warsaw salaries are currently growing faster than many apartment-price measures, which is slowly repairing the affordability damage caused by the previous boom.

According to Warsaw’s labour-market statistics, the average enterprise-sector salary was PLN 11,185 gross in June, 6.6% higher than a year earlier. Professional, scientific and technical activities recorded an even stronger 11.3% increase.

Compare that with the current new-build median. RynekPierwotny.pl has it rising about 5% annually. Recent resale asking-price growth has generally been slower still.

That difference will not suddenly make Warsaw cheap. At PLN 17,400 per square metre, a typical new apartment still costs roughly one and a half months of the average gross Warsaw salary for every square metre. A 50-square-metre apartment at that price is around PLN 870,000 before finishing and transaction costs.

But affordability can improve without nominal apartment prices falling. If salaries grow 6% to 7% while housing rises 3% or 4%, buyers regain purchasing power each year. Cheaper mortgages amplify that improvement.

This is one of the strongest reasons we currently expect slow price appreciation instead of a large correction. Warsaw can work through its affordability problem gradually while nominal home values keep edging higher.

Is Warsaw’s resale market weaker than the new-build market?

Warsaw’s resale market currently gives buyers more room to punish overpriced homes, especially when an apartment is old, badly renovated or has been sitting online for months.

Recent secondary-market asking data still show modest annual increases rather than a broad fall. The important change is how selective buyers have become.

A private seller has fewer ways to disguise a concession than a developer. Developers can include a parking space, storage unit, finishing package or flexible payment schedule while keeping the official apartment price intact. A private owner who needs to sell eventually has to negotiate the actual price.

That creates a much wider gap between good and bad resale inventory. A renovated apartment beside a metro station in Mokotów, Wola or Żoliborz can still attract several serious buyers. An inefficient apartment in an older building, priced against brand-new developments, can remain online for months.

We expect that gap to widen. The resale market may look stable in citywide data while individual sellers accept much larger discounts.

Are Warsaw developers quietly cutting prices?

Warsaw developers are increasingly competing on the effective price buyers pay, even though widespread cuts to official price lists remain uncommon.

CBRE found that newly launched apartments in Q2 averaged PLN 18,593 per square metre, 8.6% below the previous quarter’s fresh supply. Meanwhile, the average price across all developer inventory finished the quarter at PLN 19,405.

BIG DATA RynekPierwotny.pl later showed the citywide average falling for two consecutive months, driven largely by cheaper new projects entering the market.

Developers can also make an apartment cheaper without changing the headline PLN-per-square-metre figure. Parking spaces, storage rooms, payment terms, finishing packages and individual negotiations all change the real economics of a purchase.

This is where buyers should focus today. Waiting for every Warsaw developer to cut official prices by 10% could miss the part of the market where effective discounts are already available.

Could Warsaw run short of new apartments again?

Yes, Warsaw could run short of new apartments again if mortgage demand keeps recovering while developers become more cautious about replacing what they sell.

Right now, Warsaw has plenty of supply. Q2 brought 4,753 new apartments to market, far above the weak first-quarter launch level.

Development pipelines can change quickly, though. Polish construction data show developers holding substantial numbers of permits while starting projects more selectively. That gives them the option to slow construction if sales margins look unattractive.

Warsaw’s existing stock gives the market a cushion today, but completed housing takes years to replace. If quarterly sales climbed above 4,000 while launches repeatedly slipped below sales, the 16,000-plus available homes would start shrinking.

High land prices also matter. Warsaw developers cannot simply replace expensive sites with cheap ones near the centre. Construction costs, planning constraints and technical requirements put a floor under what future projects can profitably sell for.

The risk of another shortage sits further out rather than immediately ahead of us. Several quarters of inventory contraction would be the first convincing warning.

Does Warsaw still have enough people who want to buy homes?

Yes, Warsaw still has unusually strong underlying housing demand because Poland’s capital continues to concentrate jobs, high salaries and migration.

Official statistics put Warsaw’s population at roughly 1.87 million at the end of 2025. The city also had more than 1.1 million people employed in the enterprise sector and registered unemployment of only 1.6% in the latest available city data.

Warsaw also pays considerably more than Poland as a whole. The average enterprise-sector salary was PLN 11,185 gross in June versus PLN 9,402 nationally.

That income gap helps Warsaw attract workers from elsewhere in Poland as well as international residents. The city therefore has a different demographic profile from many Polish markets facing ageing populations and outward migration.

Population growth alone cannot make an overpriced apartment affordable, of course. The previous boom showed how quickly property prices can outrun even a strong labour market.

Still, Warsaw has a deep pool of households that want to live there and can gradually earn more. That makes a long housing slump less likely than in a city where both employment and population are shrinking.

Are Warsaw rents high enough to keep apartment prices supported?

Warsaw rents are high enough to support apartment values, but current rental yields still look too ordinary to trigger a huge investor buying wave.

AMRON-SARFiN measured Warsaw rents rising roughly 6.1% year over year in Q2, faster than in the other large cities it tracked.

Take a simple example. An PLN 850,000 apartment renting for PLN 4,200 a month produces gross annual rent of PLN 50,400, equivalent to a gross yield of about 5.9%.

The real return is lower after vacancy, administration, repairs, furnishing, taxation and other costs. More expensive central Warsaw apartments can also produce lower yields because purchase prices rise faster than achievable rents.

That still gives residential property a decent income component, especially as financing gets cheaper. But yields around this range do not make every apartment an obvious investment.

The rental market helps put a floor under Warsaw prices without creating the kind of investor rush that would overwhelm current developer supply.

Could Warsaw home prices fall 10% from here?

A 10% fall in Warsaw home prices is currently possible but unlikely without a much uglier economic or mortgage shock than anything visible today.

A correction of that size would probably require several things to go wrong together. Mortgage demand would need to fall sharply, unemployment would have to move materially higher, household income growth would need to weaken, and developer inventory would have to keep expanding while sales collapsed.

The market currently points the other way on most of those measures. Warsaw unemployment sits around 1.6%. Salaries are rising around 6% to 7%. Mortgage applications remain higher than a year ago. Q2 developer sales exceeded their five-year quarterly average.

Developer inventory is the genuinely bearish piece of the picture. More than 16,000 homes were available at the end of Q2 and over 3,300 were already finished.

That stock can produce discounts and flat prices on weak projects. Turning it into a 10% citywide correction would probably require forced selling or a serious collapse in demand.

A renewed inflation shock that pushed interest rates sharply higher could create that setup. A recession hitting Warsaw employment could as well. Without something on that scale, slow nominal growth remains the stronger bet.

What could make Warsaw home prices rise much faster?

Warsaw home prices could start rising much faster if cheaper mortgages absorb developer inventory faster than developers replace it.

The ingredients for that scenario are already partly visible. Mortgage lending has recovered, wages keep rising, and policy rates are well below their previous peak.

Inventory remains the brake. Warsaw developers still have more than 16,000 apartments available, giving returning buyers plenty to choose from.

The arithmetic can change surprisingly quickly. Suppose developers sold 4,500 apartments per quarter while launching only 3,000. Inventory would shrink by roughly 1,500 units each quarter before other adjustments. A few quarters like that would materially change the balance between buyers and sellers.

That is why we would pay more attention to inventory absorption than to one monthly price index. Once sales consistently outrun launches and completed unsold homes start disappearing, developers regain pricing power.

If that happens while mortgage rates keep falling, our 3% to 5% base case would become too conservative.

What would tell us our Warsaw home-price forecast is wrong?

Our Warsaw home-price forecast would need to change quickly if developer inventory, actual transaction prices and mortgage demand started pointing decisively in the same direction.

A bearish break would look fairly clear. Several quarters of falling transaction prices combined with rising completed inventory and weakening mortgage applications would tell us demand had finally lost the fight against supply.

The bullish version would be just as visible. Developer sales would repeatedly exceed new launches, the 3,344 completed unsold apartments would start disappearing, and mortgage activity would stay strong as rates fell further.

One month of asking-price data would not be enough either way. Warsaw’s recent experience shows how much the average can move simply because cheaper or more expensive projects enter the market.

Transaction prices deserve the most weight because they show what buyers actually paid. Inventory comes next because it tells us who has negotiating power. Mortgage demand then shows whether new purchasing power is entering the market.

So where are Warsaw home prices heading next?

Warsaw home prices should rise slowly from here, and our current base case is roughly 3% to 5% nominal growth over the next year.

The market has enough supply to stop another immediate boom. Developers had 16,345 apartments available at the end of Q2, including more than 3,300 completed homes. Cheaper projects have recently pulled the average new-build asking price down for two consecutive months, and buyers have more opportunities to negotiate.

Demand is also too healthy for us to expect a broad correction. AMRON-SARFiN’s latest Warsaw transaction data showed prices up almost 4% quarter over quarter and about 6.5% annually. BIK’s latest mortgage-demand index was still 9.3% higher than a year ago. Warsaw salaries are growing around 6% to 7%, while unemployment remains extremely low.

The next phase should feel much less dramatic than the last one. Warsaw can spend a year with some developer projects discounting, mediocre resale apartments struggling and better homes appreciating at the same time.

The biggest change is affordability. Wages now have a chance to catch up while mortgage rates fall and nominal apartment prices rise much more slowly than during the boom. That allows the market to repair itself without needing a large headline price decline.

A 10% correction would require a serious deterioration in employment, credit or interest rates. Faster-than-expected price growth would require the opposite: mortgage demand staying strong enough to eat through current developer inventory.

For now, we would not wait for a Warsaw housing crash. The fresher evidence points more convincingly toward a slow, uneven climb.

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