The Half Who Pay CashWide moat

The most useful thing to know about Dom's customer base is that it is two bases, and they respond to interest rates in opposite directions.

Roughly half of Polish home purchases are made without a mortgage at all¹ — a proportion that would look extraordinary in Britain or the Netherlands. Some of those buyers are trading up and rolling the proceeds of a sale. A large number are buying a second property with savings, as an investment, because Polish households hold an unusual amount of their wealth in cash and deposits and periodically decide that bricks are a better store of it.

That second group behaves nothing like a first-time buyer. It is not credit-constrained, so a rate rise does not remove it from the market. It is comparing the yield on a rented flat against the yield on a deposit, which means a period of high rates makes deposits more attractive and dampens it, while a period of falling rates pushes savings back toward property at exactly the moment mortgage buyers are returning too. The two groups do not move in lockstep, and that is the point: Polish new-home demand has rarely gone to zero, even in the worst of the 2022 and 2023 freeze, because the cash buyer never fully leaves.

For Dom this is a genuine structural asset, and it is the reason this page is rated more highly than the one before it. A developer whose entire customer base needed credit approval would be a pure derivative of the reference rate. Dom's is not.

It has a limit. Investment buying is sentiment-driven and can stop abruptly, and if rental yields compress far enough — through rising prices, rent regulation, or a supply wave of institutional rental stock — the arithmetic that brings this buyer to the market stops working. The number to watch is the gross rental yield in Warsaw against the deposit rate. When the gap closes, half of Dom's demand quietly loses its reason to be there.