New housing is on the verge of extinction. What statistics say about the real estate crisis

The full-scale war has hit the housing market, which has been in a state of deep stagnation for the fourth year in a row. Today, the main trend is a sharp decline in new supply: developers are mostly completing projects started before 2022 without launching new ones. This means only one thing: the preconditions for an increase in housing shortages are growing.

Before the war, Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Lviv regions were the leaders in housing construction. Now, construction activity has partially shifted to the central and western regions, but these changes do not compensate for the losses in previously key regions. What data indicates that Ukraine is rapidly approaching a housing crisis? And what statistics indicate a market collapse?

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According to the State Statistics Service, housing construction in Ukraine has been falling rapidly since 2022: while 12.7 million square meters of housing were under construction a year before the full-scale invasion, in 2024 it was only 3.9 million square meters. This indicates a deep shortage of new supply, which is likely to deepen. At the same time, in 2024, for the first time since 2022, the volume of commissioned housing increased to 9.5 million square meters (in 2021, it was 11.4 million square meters). This means that developers focused on completing projects started in previous years, while new ones hardly started

Until 2022, Ukraine had virtually no systemic housing policy. Lending remained inaccessible to the majority of the population due to high interest rates, and installment plans from developers were too short. As a result, the market worked only for a narrow category of buyers with relatively high incomes or cash reserves. Due to the lack of publicly available investment instruments, the real estate market with its price dynamics in 2020-2021 has become one of the most popular investment areas.

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The situation began to change with the emergence of the state program "eOselya." For the first time in Ukraine, a tool appeared that opened access to mortgages on acceptable terms, although not to as wide a range of customers as traditional mortgages in other countries. Developers believe that further development of such programs, as well as cooperation with banks, can give a boost to demand, which today, according to various market players, is only 10-40% of the pre-war level, depending on the region. In addition, there is pent-up demand among those who have the means to buy housing but are putting off

However, the main threat is the continued decline in the market and construction rates, which has been observed for the fourth year in a row. This creates a supply shortage that is only growing every year. And with the recovery in demand, this shortage will affect price growth.

Reduction of permits by 90%: how Ukraine is moving towards a housing shortage

LIGA.net together with Volodymyr Danylenko, founder of M4U and co-founder of the dynamic pricing service MAXIFY.AI, analyzed the dynamics of the real estate market.

In 2021, 33.3 thousand permits and notifications of the start of construction work were issued in Kyiv. In 2024, only 2.8 thousand. The drop is more than 90%. Similar dynamics can be seen in other traditionally active regions. In Kyiv region, the number of permits decreased from 33.1 thousand to 7.6 thousand, in Odesa region – from 14.3 thousand to 656 thousand. Even Lviv region, which is considered relatively safe and actively built up, will record a decrease: from 11.3 thousand in 2021 to 7.1 thousand in 2024.