Before you enter a residential development project, pause.
I'm not asking about the project. I'm asking about what you know about the place, the people, and the numbers — before you start designing anything.
I've worked with developers for over a decade. I've seen hundreds of projects. And I've seen the same pattern often enough to say this plainly.
Most sales problems don't start with the campaign. They start much earlier — at the table where someone said, “we have the plot, we're building”.
What developers who later call me don't measure
You can only manage what you measure. And only what you understand.
Polish developers typically measure one thing: the cost per square metre of construction and the target margin per square metre sold. Everything else is intuition.
Before you commit, you should know at least this much:
How the population is growing — or shrinking — in this location
Not in general. Specifically: in this municipality, this district, this pocket of the city. If people are leaving or failing to move in, no campaign will manufacture demand that isn't there.
Łódź is an example I know well. In mid-1988 the city had 854 thousand residents. Today it's below 650 thousand. For more than 35 years the population has fallen without a break and without any signal that it will change — because certain things are already baked into the age structure. In 10 years Łódź will have fewer than 600 thousand residents. In 30 years — fewer than half a million.
And there are developers who look at land prices in Łódź, notice that apartment prices have jumped over the past few years, and think it's a signal to enter. They don't grasp that it isn't that easy. Price growth in a shrinking population isn't a boom — it's a temporary effect of low rates and investment demand that has already partly evaporated. Structural demand follows the population down.
How incomes are growing among the actual residents
This is the most important filter for the popular and quality segments. You can build a great product where people simply can't afford it. At that point you're not building for the market — you're building for your own assumptions that no one verified.
How employment looks — not historically, but in the last 12 months
Old data lies. Employment markets shift fast. A city that had one big employer three years ago and doesn't today — that's a different city than the one you saw in the spreadsheet.
How crime looks and where it is heading
Not as a curiosity — as a leading indicator. High crime means more problem buyers, higher service costs, harder sales. Only enter where the index is below a defined threshold and falling. Not rising.
What the actual purchasing power of your target group is
Not the one you imagined — the one that will actually buy. In Wólka Kosowska I worked with a developer building a family estate without a playground, with premium communication, aimed at people who counted every instalment and often earned abroad in cash, without fully understanding how a Polish mortgage works. The message said something different from what that group was looking for. They were looking for value for money — how many square metres for their capacity, what's in the area, whether the developer is trustworthy. They got lifestyle and modernity.
What marketing does with this
Kotler would say you start with product and market — not communication. First you need to know who you're building for and whether you can even build something that makes sense for that group.
Godin would say: who is this for? What story are you telling, and is that story true for the people you're telling it to? If your story says “premium lifestyle on the edge of Warsaw” to people who can't afford it and don't identify with that image — you don't have bad marketing. You have a bad story built on faulty assumptions.
Hormozi would say: your offer must be so good the client feels stupid saying no. But that only works if you're reaching someone for whom your product solves a real problem. Otherwise you can have the best offer on the wrong market for the wrong group and still sell nothing.
Marketing doesn't fix a bad product, in a bad place, for a bad group. Marketing amplifies what's already there. If what's there is weak, marketing surfaces that weakness faster and more expensively.
What happens when you don't measure this
You build. You launch the campaign. Leads come but don't convert. The sales office says leads are bad. The agency says the office can't close. The board asks why results are below plan.
And here the part I know by heart begins.
One developer tells me: “I don't get it, a colleague is building three kilometres away and says he's selling without any marketing.” Another says: “Nothing's moving, I guess the market stalled.”
Both are right and both are wrong at the same time.
The first colleague is selling “without marketing” because he has a better plot, a stronger brand, and a project that hit exactly the group that has the capacity and wants to live there. He isn't selling without marketing — he's selling on accumulated capital from good decisions he made earlier. You can't see that in one campaign. You see it in what he chose before he began to build.
The second has a problem not because the market stalled. He has a problem because he entered a project without checking whether he should enter at all. And now marketing is supposed to fix a mistake that happened when the plot was bought.
Neither of them is looking at the data. Neither reads BIK reports, checks municipality absorption, or looks at how many units the competition sold last quarter and at what transaction prices — not listing prices. Both act on the belief that if they build cheaply enough, someone will turn up.
And then “cheap” becomes expensive. A project that never had a reason to exist devours marketing budget, sales time, and developer cash flow for months before anyone admits the problem started earlier.
And when the problem is already there — the second classic sentence
I've heard it from the CEO of one of the largest developers in Poland — a company with its logo on buildings in several of Poland's biggest cities.
“What if we switched marketing off for a month and see what happens?”
I understand where this comes from. A developer like that has a brand, a history, hundreds of handed-over units, and clients who refer friends. Switching ads off for a month won't kill them immediately.
But this sentence leaves out several things.
Ad systems are auction systems. The moment you disappear, someone else takes your slot and rebuilding visibility costs more than maintaining it. You don't come back to the same positions at the same price.
Beyond that — the decision to buy an apartment isn't click-and-done. The average time from first contact to a reservation agreement is 3 to 6 months. The client who shows up on site and signs today started looking half a year ago. They browsed, compared, talked to family, calculated capacity, returned to the site a dozen times. This is not ecommerce. It is one of the largest financial decisions of a person's life, and it ripens over months.
Switching marketing off for a month doesn't kill sales that month. It kills them 3 to 6 months later. By then no one remembers where the problem came from.
Before you enter
If you're planning a residential investment and you don't know how absorption looks in that location, who will actually buy, whether they can afford what you want to sell, and why they would choose you over competition with a better plot and a stronger brand — pause.
Either do this properly before you commit. Or hand this work over to someone who will measure it before you start spending.
The market doesn't reward courage. It rewards preparation.