The Central Statistical Office (GUS) housing construction statistics in January usually signal weaker or stronger investment activity. According to this rule, in the current year, a clear collapse of the volume occurred in the case of housing units completed and new building permits. However, as experts from the RynekPierwotny.pl portal note, in the category of housing starts, GUS announced a visible reaction to the collapse of data from the last two months of the previous year.
January – A Return to Mediocrity
The start of the current year, despite quite high statistical volatility from month to month, did not bring a breakthrough in the construction sector’s data, which had become clearly entrenched in recent months. As experts from the RynekPierwotny.pl portal indicate, it rather signalled the prospect of maintaining them at average levels in the foreseeable future, which the January statistics clearly approached. Even the fairly strong corrective nature of the data on new building permits and completed dwellings should not worry, being a move towards the long-term average.
The best example of this is the residential units completed, which, although they do not have fundamental significance for assessing the current state of the economy, are an important element of the state of the housing market. The achievement in this data category in January, at the level of 15.5 thousand in total, is a fairly accurate reflection of the average results from the whole of 2024. It is difficult, therefore, to interpret the nearly 27% decrease in month-to-month relation with a 4% increase year-on-year in a decidedly negative way.
Such a result of residential units completed is primarily due to developers, whose January result at just 9.4 thousand units, one-third weaker than in December of the previous year, is close to the record low statistics from recent years. It seems that developers accelerated the handover of completed units towards the end of last year, which may cause some slowdown in the dynamics of this data in the early months of this year.
Housing Starts – Recovering from Recent Falls
In the case of residential construction, regardless of the state of the market, a strong tradition for years has been the visible slowdown in investment activity in the first weeks of each year. As a result, January has been regularly and reliably the weakest month in the housing sector in terms of statistics on newly started constructions. Their volume in the first month of the year is usually significantly lower than the annual average, thereby marking a low point from which there is a rebound in subsequent periods.
However, in January this year, the construction of 17.2 thousand apartments was started in total, a result that is better year-on-year by almost one-tenth, and month-on-month by as much as 37%.
New Permits with a Reaction to Decreases
In the case of statistics of new building permits or notifications with a construction project, January resulted in a fairly large decrease. The Office counted a total of 19.6 thousand of them last month, which is over 15% less compared to December 2024, and almost 5% below the year-on-year result.
The housing market’s investment situation in the coming months will be strongly determined by the government’s final decisions regarding a new program of housing loan subsidies, geopolitics, and prospects of ending the war in Ukraine.
Unexpectedly, developer dwellings have been excluded from the new program of subsidizing housing loans, which, given the sustained oversupply of new dwellings, may weaken the dynamics of new constructions in the coming months. In contrast, the possible end of the war across our eastern border may cause some turbulence in the domestic construction market. In total, the investment prospects of the domestic housing sector in the coming months seem to be a big question mark.
Author: Jarosław Jędrzyński, expert at RynekPierwotny.pl portal.
Source: https://ceo.com.pl/poczatek-2025-roku-na-rynku-nieruchomosci-powrot-do-przecietnosci-48918
