The Institutional Buyer Who Barely ExistsThin moat

Somewhere in every developer's business plan is the customer who buys two hundred flats at once. One contract instead of two hundred, one credit check, one closing, no show flat, no marketing, revenue recognised in a block. For a company that sells four thousand homes one at a time, it is an obviously attractive proposition.

It has been arriving in Poland for about a decade without arriving. At the end of the first quarter of 2025 the institutional rented sector held about 24 400 completed units across 33 investors, with plans that implied roughly a quarter more by year-end¹. Against the country's rental stock that is under one percent, and against the roughly 41 200 new flats sold in the six largest cities in a single year it is not a channel — it is a rounding error that happens to be growing.

The reason it stays small is arithmetic. An institution buying in bulk expects a discount to the retail price, because it is doing the developer a favour on scale and taking the flats before they are individually sold. In a market where retail buyers are showing up in record numbers and paying full price, that discount is expensive. Developers turn to bulk sales when retail demand is weak — which is exactly when funds have the least appetite, because their own cost of capital has risen too. The channel is most available when it is least needed.

The consolation is that it is countercyclical in a useful direction. A downturn deep enough to stall retail sales is the scenario in which a bulk buyer is worth accepting a discount for, and a company with a large finished-flat inventory and no debt pressure gets to choose whether to take the offer.

The number to watch is straightforward: what share of Dom's units are sold to institutions in any year. It has been essentially nil. If it starts rising in a strong market, that is a signal about retail demand, not about the strategy.