Document regarding Poland’s housing finance scenario and mechanism. This paper looks at the evolution of housing finance in Poland and at the factors that have supported its development. An overview of the portfolio, the major lenders, and the characteristics of typical mortgage products is provided, based on a first-of-its-kind survey of banks developing businesses in housing finance. The efficiency of the system is analyzed through a variety of efficiency measures. This paper, developed as the keynote presentation of the Final Conference of USAID’s Poland Housing Finance Project, provides a quantitative and qualitative assessment of Poland’s housing finance system both its successes and areas remaining to be addressed at the commencement of the year 2000. The Conference, jointly sponsored by USAID and the Polish Banks Association, was held on December 8 and 9, 1999 in Warsaw. Since the fall of 1996, the Urban Institute Consortium (UIC), which includes the Urban Institute, the Crakow Real Estate Institute, and numerous Polish, American, and European experts, has carried out assistance for the Poland Housing Finance Project. The UIC program has been fortunate to be involved during the crucial period after the end of subsidized lending in 1996; since then, Poland has been moving toward a new era of competitive lending and an effective institutional and legal framework for the continued development of housing finance.