Property investment in Poland almost doubled in the first half of 2026, and the country was far from alone in finding buyers again.
Savills data reported by BE News shows a 95% rise in Polish volumes on the same period of 2025, while Sweden and Spain stood out among Europe’s larger markets as turnover climbed 68% to €12.8 billion and 56% to €12.2 billion respectively.
Across the continent as a whole, Savills estimated second-quarter investment at around €53 billion, 6% higher than a year earlier.
The buyers coming back are doing so on careful terms.
James Burke, director of global cross-border investment at Savills, said lenders and investors now look harder at the security of an asset’s income, the quality of the building and the price they pay for it, and he expects prime yields to hold broadly steady in most sectors and markets through the end of 2026.
London in a Two-Way Market
For several years, the UK has sat at or near the top of the global rankings for cross-border property investment, and the first half of 2026 challenged that position.
Separate Savills figures show the UK holding on as the world’s second-largest destination, although inbound volumes fell by about a quarter, from $13.5 billion to $10.4 billion.
Offshore investors still bought more UK property than they sold, yet the margin between their purchases and their disposals had narrowed to its tightest point in more than a decade.
Over a longer window, the picture is kinder to the UK.
Across the 12 months to the end of March 2026, Colliers still placed the UK at the top of the global table, with $25.89 billion of international capital flowing into standing assets, and ranked it as the third-largest source of outbound real estate capital in the world over the same period.
Colliers linked the UK’s place on both sides of the trade to the international outlook of its own investors.
Overseas money also continues to carry a large share of the domestic market.
The Colliers UK Property Snapshot for August 2026 put international investors behind 46% of UK commercial property transaction volumes in the year to the end of July, when total investment stood at £24.3 billion, slightly ahead of the same point in 2025.
London accounted for £9.2 billion of that total, and July alone brought £4.4 billion, in line with the five-year monthly average.
Central Europe Rewrites Its Capital Mix
When investors gathered for a Real Asset Media briefing in London in November 2022, the figures presented on Central and Eastern Europe described a region still heavily reliant on outside money.
Domestic investors accounted for only about 30% of commercial property investment across six markets. In Poland, the region’s largest, foreign buyers made up 98% of activity, while Hungary sat at the other end of the range with domestic investors at 49%.
Within three years, far more of the money was coming from inside the region itself.
By the first half of 2025, capital originating within the region, counting both domestic buyers and investors crossing borders inside it, supplied 64.8% of investment volume across the seven markets tracked in the Cushman & Wakefield CEE Investment Market Update.
Western Europe then returned. In the first half of 2026, investors from Western Europe lifted their share of regional volume from 12.8% to 22.7%, with German investors behind most of the increase as their own share rose from 1.6% to 11.4%.
The share held by capital from within the region eased to 55.0%, and Cushman & Wakefield traced most of the fall to Czech-origin capital, whose share dropped from 44.5% to 33.3%.
Hungarian-origin capital moved the other way. Its share more than doubled, from 5.5% to 12.1%, which Cushman & Wakefield attributed to stronger domestic activity and growing outbound participation, and investment volume within Hungary itself rose 42.6%.
Poland, meanwhile, took 56.7% of the region’s first-half volume, its strongest first half since 2018.
Across the region, the report found more capital chasing high-quality, institutional property than sellers were bringing to market, a squeeze felt most acutely in the Czech Republic, and some prime office deals in Warsaw and Prague priced below a 6% yield.
Alongside the Western capital returning to the region sit Central European firms transforming into European investment groups, which acquire and manage assets across several Western and Southern European markets and continue to invest in their home countries.
For London’s lenders and advisers, capital travelling east and west across the continent at the same time could broaden the range of cross-border transactions they work on.
Expo Real 2026 in Munich
Each October, Expo Real brings much of this market together in Munich.
The 2026 edition, at Messe München on Oct. 5-7, carries the full title of International Trade Fair for Real Estate, Investment and Infrastructure, and its programme spans retail, hotel and logistics property alongside infrastructure.
The organisers present it as a networking platform for the key markets of Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
Europe and the United States also sit at the head of the Colliers rankings, where the UK, Germany and France joined the United States and Japan among the top five destinations for international property capital in the 12 months to March 2026.
Offshore investors remained net buyers of UK property through the first half of 2026, even as their margin narrowed, and over the same six months German investors raised their share of Central and Eastern European property investment roughly sevenfold.
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