Thos may be a bit of a long shot, am asking in case someone would know. I have googled and googled and googled, but I have been unable to find any quotes at all for how much apartments would have cost in Poland circa 1996.
The reason this interests me is that I am still doing fact checking for the novel I have written. In it, I describe the following situation: a Canadian character’s Polish cousin, who lives in the town of Czestochowa, dies in 1996 and leaves him everything. Her apartment is sold and the money sent to Canada for his benefit. I quoted his inheritance as being around $40000 CDN (around $30000 US at the time). I did not state how big the apartment was.
I know that in post-Communist countries, property prices were much lower than in the West back then (and may still be in some places), but I don’t have a figure for how much the actual price would have been in Poland. Is the quote I gave realistic (let’s say for a four-room apartment) in that city (and of course that would be after probate, lawyer’s, and real estate agent’s fees) for a town like Czestochowa, or is it too high? Would the price be more realistic if it were Krakow or Warsaw? Is there anywhere where I can find it out?
Page 102 of this pdf is interesting: the housing market at the time was weird. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/62276/309697-Homeownership-and-Housing-Finance-Policy-in-the-Former-Soviet-Bloc-Costly-Populism.PDF
Finally, both the pace and the scale of privatization of the housing stock in Poland have been more modest than that of many of its neighbors. As indicated in table 2.5, about 42 percent of Poland’s public stock was privatized as of 1997. Most of this was a transfer of ownership in cooperatives, where nearly 60 percent of the units are now in private hands. In contrast, only about 25 percent of the communal stock has been privatized. As discussed below, the rent control still endemic to this stock is of serious concern, because it both subsidizes some households who do not require assistance and retards the development of a private rental market.
Then skip to p. 124 of the pdf and onwards for a discussion of affordability. You might be able to back something out from that.
If that doesn’t help, you could try a deep dive into OECD data. Poland’s housing price series starts in 2005, but their rent series starts in 1995.
Table 1 in this paper might help you extrapolate backwards:
Thank you for the resources, Measure_for_Measure. I see the point about it being a transitional time during which privatization took place. I’ll see what else I can figure out.
Mieszkanie za 200 zł/mkw. Jak zmieniły się ceny nieruchomości od lat 90.? - Forsal.pl
The article above (in Polish) has average prices for apartments in 1996. The prices are in Polish Zloty per Square Meter. Czestochwa is not listed, but I would guess the price would be similar to Kalisz or Zielona Gora (see the table in the article). Comparing that to USD/PLN exchange rate in 1996 from Kursy walut NBP na dzień 1996-12-31 - kursy średnie - Money.pl I got about 25000 USD for an 80 square meter 4-room apartment.
Thank you so much for sourcing that - and the language skills.
OK, so we can make it Warsaw instead of Czestochowa, that would be an easy fix to make my projected price realistic.