More and more foreigners start buying real estate in Poland and the Ukrainians took the lead. There are some 295 000 foreigners in Poland who received official permission for living in the country, reported Office for Foreigners in Poland. Mostly, those are Ukrainians, the number of which has been increasing since 2014. Ukrainians constitute the largest ethnic group in Poland and their number is expected to grow further.
The number of Ukrainians willing to get residence permits in Poland increased by 40% last year. The visa free regime between Ukraine and the EU will contribute even more into increasing the fraction of Ukrainian applications. In 2015, Ukrainians bought 35 000 square meters of the residential apartments in the neighboring Poland. Meantime in 2016, the figure surged to 64 000 sq. m. The total number of real estate deals amount to nearly 200 000 per year in Poland. At this, foreigners bought some 4 648 flats which can be considered as a relatively small number of deals. It has become clear that Ukrainians started to participate in the real estate transactions more than German and British citizens in Poland, especially for the last two years.
In addition, startups created by Ukrainians began often to appear in Poland where government with the support from the EU channels enormous funds for the development and scaling up of some promising businesses.
