By Anna Grybel-Kloc

The mortgage sector is still young in the CEE region. Countries like Poland or Czech Republic adopted mortgage laws in the 1990s, while in Romania for example, mortgage law become applicable only in 2002.

As a result, mortgage finance in the these markets is a fairly new sector, with unsophisticated, but improving, products and strict lending criteria, which actually may not look so conservative now, when tightening in mortgage finance is becoming common in most countries.

Additionally, the mortgage brokerage services are not developed on a scale that they are in Western European countries.

Even in the most advanced markets, like Poland or Czech Republic, the number of brokers is limited to three or four with typically two large companies dominating the market. In Bulgaria or Romania, the market is even smaller.