There are the oldest flats in Silesia. The average Polish apartment is 44 years old
The oldest flats are in Katowice and the youngest in Rzeszów. The reason is simple – tenement houses dominate in Katowice, and development investments in Rzeszów.
Polish apartments are relatively young: the average apartment is 44 years old. This means that they will stay for a long time: the estimates of the Warsaw Center for Technical and Organizational Progress suggest that for a building with a massive structure (brick or reinforced concrete), it is not a problem to celebrate its 150th birthday. Even wooden houses have a durability limit of 100 years.
This does not mean that after a century such a house needs to be demolished: most likely, a proper renovation will suffice. The proof that wooden buildings can be used for decades are the exhibits in open-air museums. In turn, the proof of the longevity of brick houses are tenement houses in Kraków, Poznań or Gdańsk, where people live constantly.
Developers are rejuvenating apartments
Data from the Central Statistical Office, which the authors of the report on real estate prices from the HREIT company refer to, allow us to estimate that the youngest apartments can be found in Rzeszów and Białystok. The average premises there are 32 and 34 years old, respectively. The reason is very simple. In these cities, mainly thanks to the activity of developers, modern construction dominates.
Premises built between 1989 and 2023 account for more than half of all existing properties there. The share of prefabricated concrete slabs does not exceed 30%, and flats in buildings which, due to their age, could rather be called tenement houses, are the least numerous among voivodship cities. They pose
about 20 percent resource.
How did we divide the apartments according to their age?
Deciding to make a big generalization, we divided apartments depending on their age into three categories:
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apartments built before 1971 can be identified with tenement houses,
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flats built between 1971 and 1988 are mostly slabs,
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flats built after 1989 are, generally speaking, modern construction.
The more tenement houses, the older the buildings
At the other extreme, we find Katowice, Łódź and Bydgoszcz. There, the average flats are in their fifties. No surprise here either. Especially in Łódź and Katowice, flats built before the “large slab” era constitute almost every second dwelling. If that was not enough, the achievements of developers in these cities are still relatively modest – at least if we take the rest of the voivodeship cities as a background. Both in Łódź and Katowice, modern apartments account for slightly more than 20 percent. existing premises.
