How the neighbours built their houses

We shall begin our look at the stories behind the region’s real estate markets with Germany – a country that we haven’t always covered in the more than quarter-century existence of our publication, as it lies in Central Europe rather than the CEE region and, unlike Poland and our other neighbours, has been regarded for much longer as a fully-developed economy. But it is the market whose fortunes have had the most direct impact on our own, and so, this increasingly led us to pay it more attention, thus turning ‘EurobuildCEE’ into a truly Central European magazine. Given the very different trajectory that Germany has taken since the fall of the Berlin Wall compared to the CEE region, this article will briefly look at where its market is now, before moving on to how the CEE countries have progressed and currently measure up to it. “The German real estate investment market reached a transaction volume of EUR 34.3 bln in 2024 – up 21 pct compared to