Warsaw: how a mid-size capital built a skyline

TL;DR

• Warsaw counts 33 buildings above 100 metres, 13 above 150 and one above 300, a cluster assembled almost entirely since 2016. The Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU, known until October 2025 as CTBUH) ranks it fifth in Europe by completed 150 metre buildings.
• The towers are institutional product. Warsaw Spire traded at EUR 386 million in 2019 and Warsaw Unit at EUR 280 million in 2024, while HB Reavis refinanced Varso Place at EUR 510 million in October 2025.
• Supply has stopped. Cushman & Wakefield counted 118,000 sqm under construction at the end of Q1 2026, which it calls a 30 year low, and BNP Paribas Real Estate put central vacancy at 4.8% in Q2.

Warsaw spent 67 years with one tall building and no skyline. It now has 33 above 100 metres, 13 above 150 and, in Varso Tower, the only building in the European Union above 300. The interesting part is no longer the architecture. It is that the cluster was built inside a single development decade, sold to international institutions inside five years, and is now being repriced by a construction pipeline that has effectively closed.

The starting point was a single object. The Palace of Culture and Science, designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev and handed over on 21 July 1955, stands at 230.7 metres in the CVU register and was the first structure in the city to pass 150 metres. Nothing came close to it for the next six decades.

The cluster was built in one decade, not three

The decisive year was 2016. Ghelamco's 220 metre Warsaw Spire and Daniel Libeskind's 192 metre residential Złota 44 completed within months of each other, and the pace never dropped. Six years later HB Reavis topped the sequence with Varso Tower, 310 metres and 53 floors to a Foster + Partners design, which CVU records as the tallest building in the European Union. It took that title from the 259 metre Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt.

The tower has since acquired the thing a skyline needs in order to be public rather than private. Highline Warsaw opened on 9 September 2025 on the 53rd floor at 230 metres, operated by Magnicity on a 20 year lease from HB Reavis, with a cocktail terrace on the 49th. Varso Tower also hosted the first edition of RealTimes' own Dialogue of Skyscrapers series, pairing Varso Tower & Burj Khalifa.

The centre moved west, and Ghelamco moved it

The more consequential shift was geographic. Tall building activity left the historic Śródmieście core and settled in Wola, around Rondo Daszyńskiego, following the metro. One developer set that direction and then kept building along it.

• Warsaw Spire, 220 metres, 49 floors, 2016, Ghelamco.
• Warsaw Unit, 200.7 metres, 46 floors, 2021, Ghelamco.
• Skyliner, 195.1 metres, 45 floors, 2021, Karimpol.
• The Bridge, 173.9 metres, 2025, Ghelamco, grafted onto the restored 1950s Bellona printing house.
• Mennica Legacy Tower, roughly 140 metres, 2020, home to mBank's headquarters.

Rondo 1 (159.2 metres, 2006) and Q22 (155 metres, 2016) sit closer to the old centre and mark the transition between the two eras. The geography now shows up in the leasing data: of 133,800 sqm let across Warsaw in Q1 2026, Savills put 35,100 sqm in the City Centre West subzone alone.

Prime headline rents in Warsaw's city centre currently reach EUR 30.00 per sqm per month, while outside central locations they stand at up to EUR 19.50 per sq m per month. We expect rents in the most prestigious locations to exceed the EUR 30 per sqm threshold later this year.

Ewa Nicewicz, Senior Consultant, Office Agency Department, BNP Paribas Real Estate Poland

Ownership passed from developers to institutions

Warsaw's towers were built by developers and are increasingly held by institutions. Ghelamco has been the recurring seller on both sides of that trade.

It sold the Warsaw Spire tower, with Madison International Realty, to Immofinanz for EUR 386 million, closing on 11 July 2019 on roughly 71,600 sqm and invoiced rents of about EUR 19.6 million. In November 2024 it sold Warsaw Unit to the Stockholm listed Eastnine for EUR 280 million: 59,800 sqm, more than 20 tenants including Warta's headquarters, Amazon, Moderna, CBRE and Stryker, EUR 18.0 million of annual rent and a 5.1 year weighted average lease term, part funded by a EUR 168 million green loan split equally between Helaba & Erste Group.

HB Reavis is the exception and still holds Varso. On 1 October 2025 it refinanced Varso Place at EUR 510 million across seven banks, EUR 258 million of that against the tower alone, up from a EUR 475 million facility. The developer describes the deal as "the largest ever non-portfolio commercial real estate financing in CEE".

Not every story is clean. Mennica Legacy Tower spent more than five years in an ownership dispute before Mennica Polska took control on 22 September 2025, settling the assumed liabilities with a EUR 135 million surcharge that enters the bankruptcy estate for creditor recoveries. Its advisers called the structure unprecedented in Polish bankruptcy law. Height concentrates capital, and it concentrates disputes with it, which is the part of the economics of height that rarely reaches the pitch deck.

The supply gap is doing the work rents used to do

The occupational case has rarely looked stronger, and almost none of it is demand led. Warsaw's modern office stock stood at 6,277,700 sqm at the end of Q1 2026 with a 9.5% vacancy rate, on Cushman & Wakefield and Warsaw Research Forum figures. Take-up of 133,800 sqm was down around 9% year on year and below the 2020 to 2025 first quarter average of 159,100 sqm, on Savills' reading. Demand, in other words, is unremarkable.

In central zones, the vacancy rate stood at 6.5%, while in non-central locations it reached 12.2%, representing a gap of almost 6 percentage points.

Emilia Trofimiuk, AXI IMMO

Supply is the story. Savills estimates construction activity at about 120,000 sqm, the lowest level it has ever recorded in Warsaw, with 97% of it in central zones and only 72,000 sqm of completions projected for the whole of 2026 against five and ten year averages of 163,000 and 220,000 sqm. Across three years, total completions may reach only 217,000 sqm.

The pricing follows arithmetically. Cushman & Wakefield recorded prime headline rents of EUR 24.00 to 29.00 per sqm per month in the centre in Q1 2026 against EUR 15.00 to 19.00 outside it, with prime office yields at 6.00%. By Q2, BNP Paribas Real Estate had central vacancy at 4.8% against 11.8% non-central, available space down 22% year on year, and prime central rents reaching EUR 30.00. Buildings completed in the last five years showed a 2.1% vacancy rate. That is not a market with slack in it.

Winners & losers

Who gains:

• Owners of prime central towers, who face roughly three years with almost no competing delivery.
• Ghelamco and Karimpol, whose Wola pipeline sits inside the 97% of construction that is central.
• The handful of schemes actually under way, which can price into a closed market rather than a crowded one.

Who pays:

• Occupiers renewing in the centre, where 4.8% vacancy removes the option to walk.
• Owners of non-central stock, where Służewiec ran 18.7% vacant and the Żwirki i Wigury corridor 15.4% in Q1 2026.
• Owners of older buildings anywhere, now competing on age as much as address, a problem set out in when a tower ages. CVU's own news file records the June 2025 decision by Polski Holding Nieruchomości to demolish and rebuild Intraco I, one of the city's earliest skyscrapers.

What to watch, and when

Four dates carry the next phase. Karimpol topped out Skyliner II at 130 metres on 11 June 2026, with completion due in Q4 2026 and first tenants in Q1 2027. Strabag Real Estate's Upper One adds 35,500 sqm in Q1 2027. AFI & Echo Investment's 150 metre AFI Tower at Towarowa22 is the largest scheme under construction, at 50,000 sqm for delivery at the end of 2028 on the developers' own figures, though Savills books it as 55,000 sqm in Q3 2028. That gap matters in its own right, because it is the difference between a supply squeeze that eases in 2028 and one that does not.

The genuinely new element is residential. Towarowa22 has a 120 metre, 32 storey residential tower under construction and secured a further permit in May 2026 for roughly 96 apartments alongside a 12,600 sqm office building, targeted for the end of 2027. The pricing evidence already exists: Złota 44 shows a median of about PLN 57,600 per sqm across 2025 and 2026 data, in a range running from PLN 38,300 to PLN 125,000. Whether that is a repeatable product or a single trophy is the open question across the European residential tower market.

Warsaw is worth watching through 2027 for one blunt reason. It is the clearest case on Europe's tall building map of a city that built a skyline from almost nothing inside one cycle, and it is about to learn what that stock is worth in a market facing two more years of near zero delivery. More context sits across the Skyscraper Day Dive.