PM's Advisor: We will leave the previous method of real estate investment

Baghdad - INA

Advisor to the Prime Minister for Financial Affairs, Mudhar Muhammad Salih, confirmed today, Wednesday, the trend to leave the previous method of real estate investment, indicating that the state will buy from the investor and distribute to the beneficiaries in comfortable monthly installments.

Salih told the Iraqi News Agency (INA): "Iraq is moving within its housing policy announced by the Prime Minister, which stipulates providing one million housing units in new urban areas and within the urban planning of all regions of the country and in alternative locations. It is a policy that carries in its aspects a state of parallelism and integration with the establishment of new infrastructure that accompanies the urban renaissance and the generation of new cities, unlike the previous models that were built in the existing central urban areas."

He added that "we will leave the previous model of real estate investment in two directions: the first is that the state will be the owner at first after purchasing it from the investor, and it has a complete infrastructure, and will undertake its distribution to beneficiaries with limited income in the form of holdings and with very comfortable monthly installments until the final ownership, which will reduce the burden on new holders of the property, and the second is to provide easy housing loans through the Real Estate Bank, the Housing Fund and any other available funds to finance part of the reconstruction process and individual housing."

Salih continued that "although the real estate assets cycle has witnessed sharp increases during the past years and then went towards stagnation currently, but according to the new housing policy that is consistent with the government program, we expect that cycle to decline towards moderation by matching the fair value of the properties with their real prices, especially since the movement of distributing lands for horizontal housing is also going hand in hand with the vertical housing policies mentioned above, which have faltered during the last fifty years due to the wars, sieges and conflicts that the country has gone through."

He noted that "with this new integrated vision between vertical housing and horizontal housing supported by the basket of basic construction materials from the state, soft loans and new infrastructure, the trend of real estate prices in the country must take a long period of stability between the actual real estate values and their prices, in the interest of family owners with limited income, and in a gradual decline, in all governorates of the country."