Insight · Sales funnel

LEADS RISING.

Margin leaking.

April 20, 20256 min readZbigniew Dukaczewski

The biggest mistake a developer can make today? Assuming a strong March solved the sales problem.

It didn't. It only briefly covered it with false optimism.

A record that isn't the start of a boom

March's housing surge (5,400 units sold across the top 7 markets) is not the start of a new, healthy boom. It's the classic “pull-forward demand” phenomenon — a panicked acceleration of buying decisions ahead of a sharp deterioration in financing terms.

Pull-forward demand: what actually happened in March

The data doesn't lie. BIK (Polish Credit Bureau) showed a demand explosion: a +80.5% year-over-year jump in the value of mortgage enquiries and the highest number of applicants since July 2008 (63,310 people).

Why? Because developers were pushing for closings and mortgage brokers were urging clients to file applications on the old terms. And they were right to. Even though the Monetary Policy Council held rates, the cost of money stopped behaving like a “cheapening credit” scenario. The median fixed-rate mortgage offer jumped from 5.78% at the start of March to 6.5% in April.

The real test: from reservation to notarial act

So the real test for your business isn't in leads, meetings or gross reservations. It's in how many of those reservations actually make it to the notarial act.

If the cost of money is rising faster than your clients' ability to close the purchase mid-process, your “record result” is masking serious operational risk.

Developer sales funnelSales funnel visualization: from leads through meeting, reservation, credit decision, to notarial act. The leak between reservation and credit decision is highlighted.100Lead62Meeting28Reservation16Credit decision11Notarial actREVENUE LEAKAGE−43% between reservation and mortgage← margin leaks here
Developer funnel: the leak usually appears between reservation and credit decision — where the client meets the real cost of money.

Risks the record is masking

  • Revenue leakage — revenue bleeding out between reservation and mortgage.
  • Salespeople's time wasted serving the so-called “empty chairs”.
  • Burned CAC — marketing delivered traffic but not purchase-ready clients.
  • A clogged funnel and a false forecast that lulls the board.

Developer marketing in 2026: revenue quality control

In 2026, developer marketing stops being the department for “reach and lead generation”. It becomes a revenue quality control system.

Today the winner isn't the one shouting loudest about records — it's the one with hard control over the transition:

Lead → Meeting → Reservation → Credit decision → Notarial act.

If today you don't have visibility into where exactly your clients disappear at the intersection of marketing, sales, and the bank — you're not controlling growth. You're controlling the narrative.

And margin leaks.

If your sales only look good at leads, meetings, and reservations, and you don't have hard control over the transition to credit decision and act, the risk isn't “somewhere in the market”. It's already sitting in your funnel.

Over the coming months the biggest edge won't be a bigger media budget. It will be the ability to detect where revenue is actually leaking: between marketing, sales, and credit.

That's where marketing ends. And revenue management begins.