In the article, we look at how Poles’ attitudes to house building have changed in times of high economic uncertainty.
The typical new-build house in Poland in 2022 was between 101 m² and 150m² in size and was built using the brick technique. Ceramic tiles were more likely to be chosen for the roof covering, which had overtaken tile with its popularity. New constructions were most often built on the basis of a ready-made project purchased from an architect – according to a study conducted by Oferteo.pl, within the latest edition of the Report on House Construction in Poland.
This year’s report presents the results of a survey conducted in January 2023 among 465 people who were building a house in 2022.
One of the key factors that influenced the entire investment process was the planned size of the property. As was the case last year, the largest number of respondents (42%) declared that the floor area of their home was between 101 and 150 m².
Some people opted for a larger metric area between 151 and 200 m² (23%)
Even larger houses, with an area of 201 m² upwards, accounted for 11% of newly built buildings.
Investors very rarely decided to build small houses, with a surface area similar to a flat in a block of flats. Only 1% of them built a house smaller than 50 m², and buildings with an area between 51 and 75 m² accounted for only 6% of all developments.
Respondents most often cited the convenience of use (38%) and personal preferences (25%) as the main reason for choosing a particular size. For some of them, the motivation was to fit the building to the area of the plot they owned (15%). Some opted for a smaller metric area because of a limited budget, and some adjusted their expectations of the usable area to what was specified in the house design they had chosen.
Since 2022, it has been possible to build a small house of up to 70 m² without a permit. However, investors were not particularly interested in this option. Only 2% of them declared that they were adapting the size of the house to the requirements for building in a simplified procedure.
The design on which the house is built can come from a variety of sources. The most popular in 2022 were ready-made designs, purchased from an architect. 37% of respondents opted for such a step.
Slightly more than one in four respondents (27%) chose to develop an individual design in collaboration with a specialist, and 23% modified a purchased ready-made design to suit their needs.
Less frequently, in 11% of cases, investors declared that they had prepared the entire project themselves. Such an undertaking is connected with the need to have the appropriate specialist knowledge and skills to operate graphic programmes, such as AutoCAD.
For years, the largest number of houses in Poland have been built in the traditional brick technique. In 2022, as many as 82% of investors chose this option and this is 6 p.p. more than in the previous year.
At the same time, the interest in making a house of wood in the so-called Canadian technology, otherwise known as frame technology, decreased. The percentage of respondents, in this case, was 9%, compared to 11% in the previous survey.
The remaining investors opted to use prefabricated, expanded clay or logs (2% each). This means that wooden houses, i.e., those made of timber frame technology or just logs, were built 4 p.p. less frequently than in the previous year.
Another choice that investors had to make was the roofing material for the house
Ceramic tiles proved to be the most popular (41% – an increase of 7 p.p. compared to the previous year). Less common choices were metal roofing tile (38%), which was the most common roofing material chosen the previous year (42%), and concrete tiles (14% each in 2021 and 2022).