First housing project under PPP on the cards

Government is going to implement a housing project under public-private partnership (PPP) on five acres of land in the city's Mirpur area, reports UNB.

This will be the first PPP project in housing sector to be implemented by the National Housing Authority (NHA) as a pilot project, according to an official document of the Housing and Public Works Ministry, obtained by the news agency.

Sources said the NHA has moved to implement such a project under PPP on five acres of land, out of a total of 165 acres allocated by the government in Mirpur area for housing projects.

Receiving an initial approval of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs about the PPP project idea in 2010, the NHA first conducted a detailed feasibility study to get an idea about the total useful space of the project.

The study found that the five acres of land can create a total of 1.4 million square feet of space for the project where residential space will be 1.2 million sq ft and commercial space will be 0.2 million sq ft, said the sources.

The sources mentioned that it was decided that once the project is implemented, the NHA will be the owner of a total of 220,000 sq ft while the ownership of the remaining 1.18 million sq ft will go to the private partner of the project who will bear the entire implementation cost, including its construction.

Of the NAH's 220,000 sq ft space, 30,000 sq ft will be allocated among the middle income group (MIG), 270,000 sq ft for lower income group (LIG) and remaining 20,000 sq ft for the commercial buyers of the space.

The entire space of the NHA will be sold out to public on commercial basis.

Recently, the NHA floated a tender to pick up a private partner of the project, tagging a condition that the private partner has to create more than 270,000 sq ft of space for the lower income group (LIG) keeping the commercial and MIG space unchanged.

In the initial bidding, five firms participated in the tender process and finally two of them came out to be responsive bidders. They are Tropical Homes Ltd and Mir Akhter Hossain Ltd.

In the second stage of the bidding, the Tropical Homes came out to be the most eligible private partner offering a space of 409,133 sq ft for LIG while Mir Akhter Hossain's offer was 319,550 sq ft.

Official sources said the NHA will sell each sq ft of LIG space at Tk 4,300, MIG space at Tk 5,200 and commercial space at Tk 11,000.