Man and machine

Firstly, it’s important to take on board that the success of Polish real estate is down to the people involved in it. It’s because of them that the market has been growing so well over the last three decades. This is not because of the beauty of our country and not the landscapes, nor is it the temperate climate, the natural resources, the amber or the coal. It’s not even the storks or the grain. None of these are among the reasons why Western investment has been attracted to Poland, thanks to which we are now blessed with a young and robustly developing real estate market. The fact that towers are being raised around the Rondo Daszyńskiego roundabout in Warsaw and that, again and again, we hear of other huge investments, such as a recent one for a car battery factory, and that the country’s regional cities are booming. This all results from our one unique resource (you could even say our most important resource), our people. They are educated, modest, team-spirited, hard-working, ambitious and cheaper to employ than in Western Europe… by around 75 pct. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s true that on average that’s how much less we earn than the Germans, but when compared to the French it looks a little better. They only make 60 pct more than us.

Of course, low pay is just one of the factors that make Poland attractive, but it’s not the only draw. After all, there are many places in the world where people earn less and often even much less. But despite this, it’s in Poland where investors want to open their back-offices, so that they can employ Poles to do their administrative work. It’s these same Polish people that foreign firms want to employ as engineers, IT workers and accountants. Global companies are not coming here because they like the risk and fancy a gamble. They are coming over because other companies have found the experience of employing Polish people to have been very worthwhile.

To a large extent, this is also a credit to those who educated these people. I’m not only talking about Polish schools, which we love to complain about, but about our upbringing and our homes, where soft skills and our values are taught. There is a reason why I’m going on about this. Two years ago I wrote something similar in a ‘Eurobuild’ Endpiece for the month of May, when Mother’s Day takes place in Poland (and also Father’s Day), and then I took the opportunity to thank all mums and dads, probably few of whom realise how much the real estate market owes to their endeavours.

I also think that it is only now that we can see how quickly the rules of the game are changing in the real estate market. After all, it not just idle chin-wagging when people say the market is being transformed by technology. You might have heard that the tallest warehouse building in Poland, a high storage facility owned by Amika in Wronki, is operated by (wait for it…) one – and I mean just one – single person for each shift. In this vast centre, with 46m ceilings, in the space of an hour 1,600 white goods units can be stored or despatched – and it is operated almost entirely by robots zooming up and down the aisles. People are almost completely unnecessary. For this issue of the magazine, I interviewed the boss of a security company, who explained to me that artificial intelligence has dramatically reduced the need to employ people in his sector. For example, a small, cheap camera can now tell if the person approaching a car is its owner or a potential thief. In simple terms, you could say that machines are beginning to pick up on such subtleties, just like a human would.

Today, it can be clearly seen that technology is no longer being treated as a risky expense, but more as a way to gain a competitive advantage that could even be on a global scale. What’s more important is that apparently success built on hi-tech can endure. Although I’m certain that human resources will remain the basis for the development of the real estate market here in Poland for at least another 20 years (and with that much time we should be able to catch up with pay levels in the West), eventually we are going to exhaust the possibilities of that resource. If we want to maintain the growth we have seen in real estate over the last three decades, now is the time to play the technology card – and we need to calmly and confidently raise the ante. In a big way.