Unrest drags down housing sales

Political unrest has hit hard the Tk 250 billion real estate sector and its backward linkage industries, industry people said.
Senior vice president of Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh (Rehab) Liakat Ali Bhuiyan said the sector has incurred a total of Tk 17 billion in losses during the on-going countrywide blockade.
He said more than 200 sub-sectors (backward linkage industries) are making losses as they cannot transport their manufactured products to the project sites while the developers fail to go for construction work.
He said sales of plots or flats have dropped by more than 60 per cent and the developers are counting losses every day.
According to a Rehab statistics, more than 4.0 million people are directly and indirectly involved with the sector and it is contributing a lot to the national economy.
The sector had been facing problems since the disaster in the capital market and currently new investment to this sector is almost nil.
The Rehab senior leader said the existing projects taken up by the developers are progressing at a snail's pace as they are not getting enough financial supports from the banks.
He said a good number of developers have already missed the scheduled completion deadlines of their projects. He fears as a result there could be a chaotic situation between the developers and the clients who have already paid some instalments and other charges.
The senior leader said both the clients and the developers are making losses now.
A cement trader said he has supplied cements to several sites at the middle of the last year but till today he is not getting payment.
He said as his major customers are of the real estate sector, he is in great trouble due to low demand from the land developing companies.
He said apart from cement more than 200 sub-sectors are in trouble with industrial products business. A former Rehab leader said the government's monetary policy has also affected the sector a lot.
He said both the customers and the developers are not getting loan facilities from the financial institutions due to the central bank's new strict policy on investing in housing sector.
himelshamsul@gmail.com