Counter-Cyclical BuyingNarrow moat

The most valuable thing Dom Development does with its land bank is refill it at the right moment — and the right moment is usually when everyone else is too frightened to buy. When Polish interest rates spike and mortgage demand freezes — as in 2022, when rates hit 6,75% and new mortgage lending roughly halved¹ — smaller and more leveraged developers stop buying land entirely; they are conserving cash to survive. That is precisely when the best plots come up at the best prices, and it is precisely when Dom, with its fortress balance sheet, goes shopping. It did exactly that through the 2022–23 freeze: the land bank grew from 17 125 units of capacity at the end of 2022 to 19 770 a year later — up 15%, with the Kraków bank nearly doubling — while much of the industry stood still². Buying cheap land in the downturn is what stocks the pipeline that will be sold, profitably, into the next upswing.

This counter-cyclical instinct is where the land bank and the balance sheet reinforce each other into something more than the sum of the parts. Anyone can buy land in a boom; the advantage belongs to the company that can buy in the bust, and only a financially disciplined leader can. Each cycle, therefore, tends to leave Dom Development with better-bought land and a stronger relative position — the quiet mechanism by which a narrow moat in a cyclical business slowly widens.