Iraq Business News

“House building across the country creates far reaching opportunities for local and internal firms in Iraq”

 

 

From the Eye On Iraq: The Mayor of Baghdad, Sabir al-Issawi, has revealed a five-year plan to build 300,000 housing units in the city. According to al-Issawi, the country is talking with a wide variety of developers from across the world who are interested in investing in the country’s real estate market. The Iraqi government has identified the need for more than 1.5 million residential units countrywide.

A New Zealand construction firm, Atconz Real Estate Development, said Iraq is one of the most exciting emerging markets at present, and is about to start work on a $100 million project to build 1,565 residential units in a suburb of Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region.

Last June, the Iraqi cabinet approved a 10-year plan to build 3.5 million housing units, a government source said. The source, refusing to be named, said the plan once implemented should “put an end to the current housing crisis” by constructing 350,000 units every year. The project will be financed from oil revenues.

“The project has attracted the attention of international property firms in the UAE, Brazil and South Korea,” the source added. Kurdish-held provinces of Erbil, Dahouk and Sulaimaniya will not be covered as the authorities there receive the region’s share of oil royalties estimated at 17% of what the country earns annually.

The units, mainly flats, will be sold to families without a plot of land or a house of their own. “They will be sold to Iraqis in return for affordable monthly instalments,” the source said. The Real Estate Bank will provide the loans for civil servants that will almost cover the purchase. The project is the largest ever in Iraq and if implemented the country may eventually land on a success story.

In the meantime, the Iraqi Ministry of Housing and Construction has now completed the draft of its national housing policy, which it stated is part of a much wider project to strengthen the capacity of the housing sector in the country. “Following thorough discussions during a two-day workshop, the ministry has made its final amendments to the National Housing Policy draft,” a senior under-secretary of state in the ministry, Istabrak al-Shouk, said in a statement released by the ministry. The draft is part of a project to improve the capacity of the housing sector in Iraq, conducted by the ministry in cooperation with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in Iraq.

Tags: Business, Construction, Iraq, news

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.