Volume 22 (2014): Issue 3 (September 2014)

The process of transformation in Poland contributed to the dynamic development of the housing market and caused a growth of aspirations among Poles related to the housing environment. The diversity of lifestyles has brought about new, different expectations of the residential environment. Meanwhile, most surveys examining housing preferences and focused on the location of housing, services and infrastructure in housing estates, and urban and architectural standards show similar expectations of residents in regards to their housing environment. The phenomenon of the homogenization of expectations regarding the residential environment appears regardless of the household lifecycle, place of residence, or level of wealth (STACHURA 2013).

Research methods testing users’ preferences allow an expected set of characteristics of the housing environment to be specified. If the respondents' aspirations regarding the housing environment are similar regardless of the segment they belong to, it may be assumed that possible differences may be revealed by a more detailed study.

People perform many activities in their homes. These activities are related to everyday living, family and social life, work or hobbies. Each of them may be in assigned to one or more rooms in a dwelling. Activities may have different meanings and hold a different degree of importance to the residents. When purchasing a new dwelling, buyers prefer homes where the activities most important to them can be carried out in the most satisfactory way. The study attempts to establish the relationships between activities and sub-settings (dwelling or residential environment features) as well as between activities and their meanings.

This paper presents an extended method of examining residential preferences: respondents declare, in a survey questionnaire, what activities are carried out in the dwelling, and how they attach meanings to these activities. The pilot study showed that some of the activities are strongly associated with one specific room, while others may be connected to any room. Rooms in Polish homes have many functions. Some of the functions are strictly connected with the type of room (bedroom, bathroom), but there is also a set of everyday activities that can be assigned to different rooms, selected by the resident. The present research revealed that activities can take on different meanings, which determines their level of importance to the dwelling user.

Residential property price indices can serve as a useful tool in the practice of real property market analysts, investment advisers, property developers, certified property appraisers, estate agents and managers. They can also be applied in property price valorization in specific legal positions. The Polish Act on Real Estate Management puts an obligation on the President of the Central Statistical Office to announce real property price indices, but the CSO fails to fulfill this obligation. The author’s rationale for this article is to contribute to works on rules of how to build property price indices. Presented within are the results of research on determining the price indices of such types of residential property as: a part of a building constituting a separate property and strata titles in housing cooperatives. The flats were divided into categories by floor area and by their location in 16 voivodeship capitals. The major purpose of the study is to prove that the prices of flats of different floor area change at different rates. Consequently, it seems worth considering whether a more detailed segmentation of the real estate market would be worthwhile for the sake of more accurate real property price indicators.

The object of this paper is to determine real estate market value on the basis of a multidimensional function model in different variants: A - directly from the model estimated on the basis of a big database, B - from the same model form, but estimated on the basis of a reduced database consisting of dwellings most similar to the estimated one, and C - based on modeled prices corrected by random correction, calculated from random deviations for dwellings most similar to the assessed one. In the framework of statistical inference procedures, the resulting comparison was carried out by parametric significance tests. They were applied to draw conclusions on the analyzed variants

Environmental factors are among the key determinants of real estate prices. They include landscape attractiveness, land relief, exposure to sunlight and proximity to natural features. In large urban centers, traffic noise emissions significantly affect decision-making on the real estate market. Weakly developed road networks and the absence of ring roads that shift road traffic outside residential districts are a widespread problem in the cities of Central-Eastern Europe. The prevention of traffic noise pollution, one of the key environmental problems in Europe, is an important goal of European Union policy. This paper analyzes the correlations between apartment prices and traffic noise levels in Olsztyn, the capital city of the Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodeship (province) in north-eastern Poland. A linear correlation analysis was performed, and the distribution of unit prices of apartments was mapped by ordinary kriging.

This study examined similarities between local real estate markets in Poland from 2006 - 2013 by analyzing changes in housing prices. The analyses covered five cities - all of which are major centers of their regions: Warsaw (Mazovia - the center of Poland), Bialystok (Podlasie - the east of Poland), Cracow (Malopolska - the south of Poland), Poznan (Wielkopolska - the west of Poland) and Gdansk (Pomerania - the north of Poland).

The time period was chosen so that it covered an interval of rapid changes in real estate prices (a housing bubble) and their subsequent relaxation to the equilibrium state. Firstly, a multi-dimensional analysis which took into account the Chebyshev distance was employed. This helped to conduct an analysis of the correlation of price changes over time, which revealed their concurrence and, moreover, showed specific propagation delays to external stimuli, and hence could be a measure of the market’s inertia. The degree of integration of the local markets under study changed only slightly over time; therefore, a thesis can be put forth in regard to the interrelation of local real estate markets, imagined as a system of communicating vessels. In the second stage, the damped harmonic oscillator model was employed to describe the observed evolution of real estate prices. This study exhibited high inertia in real estate markets, manifested during rapid structural changes in the system’s state occurring in conditions far from equilibrium. In long-term evolution, the pace of change is slow enough for the systems to remain close to equilibrium

In the traditional approach, geostatistical modeling involves analyses of the spatial structure of regionalized data, as well as estimations and simulations that rely on kriging methods. Geostatistical methods can complement traditional statistical models of property transaction prices, and when combined with those models, they offer a comprehensive tool for spatial analysis that is used in the process of developing land value maps. Transaction prices are characterized by mutual spatial correlations and can be considered as regionalized variables. They can also be regarded as random variables that have a local character and a specific probability distribution.

This study explores the possibilities of applying geostatistical methods in spatial modeling of the prices of undeveloped land, as well as the limitations associated with those methods and the imperfect nature of the real estate market. The results are discussed based on examples, and they cover both the modeling process and the generated land value maps.

Public real estate management is performed according to country-specific procedures. However, there are some features which are common for all post-socialist countries. It may be possible to implement and transfer into the Polish system the good management practice which has been developed by leading countries. On the other hand, Poles may have a chance to become acquainted with the rules governing public real estate management in other countries and to identify some practices which ought to be avoided. There is no need to implement faithfully those procedures which in other countries have been recognized as generally inadequate or inefficient and have been replaced by new solutions. This pertains to some principal components of the real estate management system.

The aim of the paper has been to present public real estate management systems in Poland and Slovakia in the context of good governance, and to suggest some indicators for assessing the procedures in these systems in terms of their efficiency.

The economy is subject to periodic changes in activity, which is apparent in the financial situation of households and enterprises. However, the recent economic crisis has been particularly severe. After the great increase in economic activity, which in many countries was connected with the boom in the real estate market, it experienced a sudden turn for the worse, including the broadly understood construction sector. This contributed to a slowdown of the growth rate, or even a permanent economic downturn. The authors have undertaken an analysis of the situation in the construction sector and the condition of residential real estate markets in selected Central European countries, and next, on the basis of a database on the financial situation of selected construction companies constructing buildings in those countries, searched for an answer to the question of how much the construction sector and the analyzed enterprises changed their activity in the recent years. For the purpose of the analysis, a database of over 340 entities from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary was created. The work is of a comparative nature, which allows the scale of the processes studied in the individual countries to be identified.

The municipal real estate stock, including housing, serves as an asset base in the process of carrying out statutory tasks by the municipality. Due to the numerous functions of municipal housing in socioeconomic development and its influence on people’s living conditions, it is essential that local governments manage the stock with particular rationality and effectiveness. Management activities differ according to the aim, type and functions of the stock. This paper discusses conditions and potential benefits for the municipality from replacing budgetary units with commercial companies that take over the statutory tasks of municipalities in the field of public social housing and providing the right conditions to enable people’s housing needs to be met. Furthermore, the author presents possible financial settlement forms resulting from leasing municipal housing to commercial companies.

Environmental protection regulations influence the use of real property. Land located within the borders of a national park or nature reserve is subject to partial or total restriction on development by construction, as well as, amongst others, business, trade, manufacturing or agricultural activities. Such areas are also subject to landscape protection, whereby real development by construction is possible, but only under the condition that it does not clash with the landscape values of the area. Therefore, real property management in such areas requires careful coordination with the relevant legislation concerning environmental protection.

While it is currently possible to obtain such information from existing environmental protection databases and systems, this has practical problems owing to the large amount of them and their scattered locations. Additionally, as each institution involved in environmental issues has collected material independently, there is a high level of data repetition as well as incomplete data. Such problems make it difficult to make full use of the database systems.

A lack of communication and reference between these databases and systems can create confusion. Comparative data on the same subject often differs depending on the source (as concerns graphic presentation and, much less frequently, data attributes). For example, the course of the same river differs depending on which data resources are used (NAŁĘCZ 2007). There are several hundreds of databases and registers maintained in Poland, with almost 300 databases and registers controlled by the Ministry of Environment. Almost 60 such databases can be found in public administrative bodies alone. A portion of the data regarding this topic is openly available on the Internet.

The aim of the paper is to present the existing information systems concerning environmental protection. The paper will also examine data obtained from these resources, as well as their availability and connections with real property management activities.