The Second-Hand FlatThin moat

Every developer table in Poland leaves out the biggest supplier of homes in the country. It is not a company. It is the several million people who already own a flat and might sell it.

For a buyer, a new-build and a second-hand flat in the same district are substitutes. They are compared on price per square metre, on location, on how soon someone can move in. The existing home usually wins on the first and third of those and often on the second, because the older districts are the central ones. What the new home offers is condition, layout, energy cost, and the fact that nobody has lived in it.

This competitor has properties no developer can match. It carries no land bank, waits on no permit, employs no one, and funds nothing. Its inventory expands automatically when prices rise, because higher prices persuade more owners to sell — which means the supply that competes with Dom grows precisely in the conditions that make Dom's projects most profitable. It is the reason new-build prices in Warsaw cannot detach indefinitely from the second-hand market a tram stop away — in the first quarter of 2025 the average transaction price was 16 383 złoty per square metre on the primary market against 16 459 złoty on the secondary¹, so a new flat sold for about half a percent less than an old one.

Set against that, the new-build market has one durable structural advantage: the mortgage machinery, the developer escrow accounts, the warranties and the state programmes are all built around new construction, and a buyer purchasing from a company with a thirty-year record is taking a different kind of risk than one buying from a stranger.

The honest reading is that this bounds the moat rather than threatens it. Dom cannot win share from the second-hand market; it can only be priced sensibly against it. The number to watch is the spread between new and existing prices per square metre in Warsaw — when it widens too far, buyers move, and no amount of brand does anything about it.