Housing price transparency — what the act really changed in developers' offers

What exactly the act requires

The amendment to the developer act was passed by the Sejm on 24 April 2025, and the price transparency provisions came into force on 11 July 2025. A developer or business selling units is required to publish on its website the price of every unit — both per square metre and for the whole unit — and to keep it up to date. The address of the pricing page must appear in advertising materials. On top of this comes the obligation to report data daily in an open format to the dane.gov.pl portal — even when prices have not changed. Companies already selling before 11 July were given until 11 September 2025 to comply.

How developers responded

The market's reaction split into three groups. The first — the largest among players with settled processes — simply revealed their price lists and wired the daily data export to dane.gov.pl into their CRM systems. For them the change was mainly operational. The second group treated the obligation as a box to tick — hence the well-publicised cases of listing prices of "PLN 1 per flat", formally meeting the letter of the rule while in practice circumventing its purpose. The third part of the market simply did not manage in the first weeks, which translated into a wave of reports of irregularities.

The dane.gov.pl portal and a new data layer

The most underrated effect of the act is the emergence of a public, machine-readable set of asking prices from across the country, updated daily. This is a raw material that did not exist before: portals, analysts, banks and competitors can now compare price lists investment by investment, track the pace of change and catch discrepancies between advertising and the actual price. For a developer this means that every price-list adjustment is immediately visible — and any inconsistency between what a salesperson says and what the open data file shows becomes a reputational and legal risk.

Controversies and weak points of the regulation

The industry called the act a "dud" from the outset. The provision that stirs the most emotion is the one allowing a buyer to demand a purchase at the "most favourable" price from a given period — in practice its effectiveness can be illusory, because a developer can update prices on its website very quickly. UOKiK oversees compliance with the rules, and breaches carry severe financial penalties calculated as a percentage of the company's turnover.

Effects on marketing and sales

The biggest change happened in the process, not in the price list. The "price on request" model, in which the first contact served mainly to qualify a lead, is over. Today the price is the entry point, not a reward for leaving a number. This shifts the weight of competition from "hiding the price" to the quality of the offer. The cost of internal disorder is rising too — if marketing, sales and systems show three different prices for the same unit, the act makes that discrepancy public. The price must have a single source of truth.

What this means for the market

The act neither cooled the market nor levelled prices — it turned the price from a negotiating tool into part of the market's information infrastructure. The winners are developers with orderly data and a single, consistent flow of information from the price list through the website to the salesperson's materials. It is a regulation that rewards operational order — and makes the quality of the sales and marketing system no longer a matter of convenience but a matter of legal compliance.