This land is my land

As Delmar says in the Coen brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou?, "Hell, you ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land". Well, I gone out an' got me a whole acre of the stuff. That's another 2,000m² on top of the 2,000m² I already bought with my działka house (1 acre = 4,047.8m² ). "Buy land, they don't make it no more!" "Land is the only thing that matters; land is the only thing that counts."

I bought the adjacent plot as an investment for the future; although currently an orchard boasting 42 apple trees, it comes with permission to build 'extensive' housing (ie not more than one single-family house per 500m². Intensive housing = block of flats = no).

Below: view of both plots from the other side of the road. To the left is my original plot (the house set so far back from the road that it's not visible). The newly purchased orchard is to the right.

Below: a Sketch-up 3D model of my house, showing its situation to scale on the 4,000m² rectangle. The original fence is seen dividing the two plots, trees are omitted for clarity. The rectangle is roughly 20m wide by 200m long.

Below: view from my rear upstairs patio. To the left is an medium-tension electricity pylon that currently runs through the new plot. Beyond is the forest that lines the eastern edge of the plot.

Below: reverse-angle view; in the distance you can make out the house (repainted white when the external thermal cladding was applied). The concrete electricity pylon is visible.

What now? Well, the most important thing is to mark and fence my territory. This needs to be done by a geodeta, a legally-recognised surveyor, who will mark out the boundaries of the newly purchased plot. These will form the legal basis on which I will be able to fence off the land and in effect merge or unify the two plots as one.

Now, to do this, I need to have clear title to the land that I have bought. This has been checked by the notariusz (notary-public) in Grójec who carried out the transaction (an excellent and professional service, by the way, Magdalena Grzesik should you need a notariusz in Grójec). All is good, but the court in Grójec has to enter the transaction and with it my ownership title in the księga wieczysta (literally 'the eternal book' or land and mortgage register). This can take time! When I bought the first plot (with house), I waited between mid-November 2017 and late January 2018 for confirmation from the court that the transaction had been registered and a new księga wieczysta set up in my name. The notariusz told me that she had cases where the new owner had been waiting six months for the court to register the transaction! One way or another, I cannot summon a geodeta to measure and mark the land without a księga wieczysta in my name. So I wait.

Until then, I need to keep the existing fence to the east of my original plot, as there is no fence to the east of the new plot.

Once done, I need to keep a close eye on local development plans. A new asphalted access road to the north of the two plots that is shown on the plans would be useful, allowing easy partition of the north half of the plot into a stand-alone unit, making it easier to develop and eventually sell.

I have time, I have options. The fun part will be to design and cost a new house, which, naturally, will be built to be as energy efficient as possible from the outset. Heat pumps, solar panels etc. But that is many years into the future! The opportunities are huge. In theory, I could build up to eight houses on this property (doubtful though). In the meanwhile, some landscape gardening is an interesting prospect - a small pond, small hillocks, silver birches, pines, paths running through it all...

Finally, I must say I much prefer buying property in Poland compared to the UK process. This is my fourth property purchase in Poland and each one has gone smoothly - the institution of the notariusz being better suited for the job than the English solicitor. Conveyancing UK-style, with exchange of contracts and completion and piles of extra paperwork generates stress and takes time. If there's clear title, the Polish system is straightforward and relatively inexpensive.

This time three years ago:
Preening stork

This time six years ago:
Preserving meadowland - UK and Poland 

This time seven years ago:

Poland's transport infrastructure progress

This time eight years ago:
Cara al Sol - a short story

This time nine years ago:
Pumping out the floodwater

This time ten years ago:
To Góra Kalwaria and beyond

This time 11 years ago:
Developments in Warsaw's exurbs

Warsaw's big billboards

I was standing on the corner of Al. Jerozolimskie and ul. Marszałkowska, when I noticed small objects raining down on me from on high - short lengths of string, cable ties, bits of plastic. I looked up to see a crew of mountaineers (alpiniści in Polish) taking down a huge advert from the side of a ten-story building.

Although the area was not roped off to pedestrians, the work was carried out extremely quickly and efficiently. Within three or four minutes the operation was all over.

The use of residential buildings as gigantic advertising hoardings is controversial. There are two arguments against - one is aesthetic - Warsaw is becoming one vast advert; fine architecture (not in this particular case) is being hidden from view. The other argument concerns people who live behind the ads. You will see in the top photo lights pointing at the billboard to illuminate it at night. These shine directly into people's flats when they're trying to sleep. They do receive some remuneration (via their building's administrators). The ads are supposed to be translucent, but every now and then, someone living behind a billboard takes a Stanley knife to it to let in some daylight.

The practice of using buildings as giant billboards started in the late 1990s, when there was a lot of refurbishment of facades going on in central Warsaw; the scaffolding etc was covered up by huge ads which helped pay for the building work and protected it from the elements. The next step was to to use buildings not undergoing renovation (I seem to recall the Universal building on the opposite corner of this crossroads being one of the first) for billboards that could be up to 50 metres high.

Above: seconds after it's off the wall, the billboard is furled up and dragged away. It looks like the guys are taking it down to the Metro station. Now there's an improbable conceit - imagine them stuffing it into a rush-hour Metro carriage!

I have nothing against huge billboards - when they are on the side of uninhabited buildings (such as this unfinished development on the corner of Sobieskiego and Sikorskiego that I wrote about in September 2009) or when they are helping to pay for ongoing refurbishment work. Warsaw looks like the opening credits sequence of that excellent US TV show, Mad Men (Moni and I have just one more episode of the fourth series to watch then nothing until March 2012). We're going to miss it - TV drama at its very best.

But blocking people's access to sunlight, blasting their windows with lights when they're sleeping - that's not on.

Commuters jammed on dawn's byways

Regular readers will know that for much of the time in Jeziorki you can walk around for hours without encountering another human being. This peaceful state is replaced each weekday morning by a traffic jam of out-of-towners seeking an alternative way to work to ul. Puławska. For years now, Puławska in the morning is a solid jam all the way from Piaseczno to Al. Wilanowska, where traffic finally eases. So cars from Piaseczno, Lesznowola, Magdalenka and all points south snake in through Zgorzała, their drivers taking every short-cut possible to avoid standing still, like rivulets of water running around rocks on their way downhill.

Above: ul. Trombity, close to our house, just after sunrise. A steady stream of cars is progressing down our street. Speed bumps restrain impatient drivers' latent idiocy, while at the other end of our road, a half-kilometre-long jam awaits these cars.

Below: Those who don't turn off onto our road have a half-kilometre long jam on Karczunkowska to get to Puławska, for a further 7km of stationary traffic.

Living in Jeziorki, we have alternatives; the city centre is within striking distance of a fit and determined cyclist, and the train service is reasonable. But I do feel some sympathy for those living further out, beyond the reach of Warsaw's public transport network.

A few months ago I was talking to the owner of a terraced house in Mysiadło, just outside Warsaw's boundaries. He bought the house at the height of the post-EU accession boom, for 1.1m złotys. Now he's looking with his wife to move to a larger house, further out, in Magdalenka. The estate agent they talked to said they could expect to sell their house for 700,000 złotys - a prospective owner would have the negotiating power to haggle 100,000 złotys off the 800,000 złotys asking price, she said.

Why have the prices of houses in Warsaw's outer suburbs fallen so dramatically? Apart from the general state of the market, it is jams. People living on the capital's fringes are having to spend three hours a day in a car make a straightforward financial calculation; how much is that time worth?

Warsaw's property market is opaque. In England, everyone knows to the nearest £5,000 how much their property's worth. This is because estate agents' windows are full of pictures of houses inside and outside, prices clearly marked. Local newspapers are stuffed with illustrated ads of houses, conveniently grouped by area and price. At dinner parties, Brits will swap tales of that house across the street that's "just like ours, but with a smaller garden that's just gone for half a million". Poles have little clue as to how much their property is worth until they actually try to sell it. In London, a house is advertised as selling for, say, £595,000 freehold. In Warsaw, property prices are expressed in zlotys per square metre - if at all.

Out of curiosity I looked in one estate agent's window in Nowe Miasto, clearly aimed at tourists. Lots of photos of interiors of flats - nearly every price tippexed out. Total lack of information. Only one property had a price shown - 13,500 złotys per square metre for a 52.2m flat. How much? Well, I make that 705,000 złotys. How much is ground rent? Doesn't say. Where's the flat? Only the vaguest indication.

Poland's estate agents are, by and large, not very good. Because they try to extract a fee from both buyer and seller, there's a good incentive for both parties to avoid a costly intermediary. Buyers would spend all Saturday driving around Konstancin or Magdalenka looking for that house in the estate agent's photo with the blue roof and the wooden swing in the front garden. So the estate agent doesn't show a photo or say where the property is. Instead, tens of thousands or ads are dumped onto the internet, most of them no longer current ("Ah... that house has just been sold... but we have dozens like it...").

Until the property market becomes more transparent and Warsaw's commuting issues are at least alleviated, we are all condemned to jams and overcrowed public transport.