Iraqi Kurdistan real estate is stagnating

Iraqi Kurdistan real estate is stagnating

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Editorial Staff in 1 Top News, Real Estate

Buildings in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo: AFP

HEWLÊR-Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— I know a man who became a millionaire just a few years ago. Overnight almost. Everybody envied him. Now he couldn’t even scratch together couple of thousand dollars. He went bankrupt when the market crashed,” said Pshtiwan Abdulla, a real-estate broker in Iraqi Kurdistan capital city of Erbil.

Abdullah, who himself only narrowly escaped the drama in the Kurdish real estate venture that followed the financial crunch of 2014, has heartbreaking stories from property moguls in the Kurdistan Region who in short period of time made and lost billions of dollars as prices plummeted.

“It’s bad enough, and now when the displaced people are returning home to Iraq, there will be thousands of empty apartments and houses in Kurdistan. It will go further down,” he said of the property prices who took a rollercoaster ride in the months after ISIS rampage in northern Iraq followed by the dramatic fall in oil prices.

In its heyday, between 2008 and 2013, around 145,000 permissions were granted to real estate developers to build mostly residential homes and apartments. The data shows that during that period almost half of all residential projects in Iraq were built in the Kurdistan Region where security was the main factor.

The market seemed increasingly promising and the prices doubled and tripled almost immediately after finishing the construction, depending on the location of the buildings.

Dozens of luxury and affordable communities, many of them gated with guards and security installations, were built in most parts of the Kurdistan Region, especially in the capital Erbil where property prices in some locations competed with those in metropolitan cities like London and Los Angels.

“A property that cost $250,000 in Erbil before the economic crisis, is now worth $160,000,” said Abdulla and added that in many places the prices have gone down much further, by around 70 percent.

The economy has recovered enough to offset Kurdistan Region’s colossal deficit over the past year following excruciating austerity reforms, and the government has recently said that “the worst is behind us” as oil prices have stabilised around $50 dollar a barrel.

But nevertheless, the real estate business will probably never become what it was before the crisis in 2014, at least in the foreseeable future.

“We have over 75,000 empty residential units and we really don’t expect buyers anytime soon,” head of the Kurdistan Region investment board Nouri Usman told Rudaw in an interview recently, confirming that the government will limit construction of new homes until demands increase.

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