Rehab sales
Shabbir Choudhury, UK
I have seen a number of articles where people complain that real estate developers are not providing housing for the poor. There are a number of developers providing housing for low-income groups, you can buy a decent apartment for about 20-30 lakhs in Dhaka, visit the next Rehab fair and you will see for yourself. If this is the case, the complainers are talking about the very poor, the homeless and unemployed. In which democratic country do private real estate developers make housing for free? None. It is not the job of a private business to provide housing for the very poor, it is the job of the government, that is why they collect taxes for social welfare. Businesses are in operation for profit, not for charity, that is the very underlying principle of capitalist economics, and that is why they are called businesses and not charities. There are other allegations like real estate companies only selling luxury apartments to corrupt officials and that is why their sales are down. I have spoken to a friend in this sector and his reply was very interesting. A certain proportion of their customers are corrupt officials, but the vast majority of their customers are not. Real estate developers don't want to sell to government officials because they (government officials) don't want to pay, they are used to getting things for free, or they want to buy at cost price so the developer makes no money. They also often are too arrogant to pay ground rent and make very bad tenants, creating too many problems for real estate companies. If you ask a developer, they are reluctant to sell to government people; ultimately they are blackmailed into it as the politicians threaten to make their lives difficult. They will avoid selling to government people at all costs, but sometimes they are cornered and have no choice. Most of the Rehab customers are shop owners, garments people, Bangladeshis living abroad, business people. The reason why sales have gone down is because these sectors are holding on to their money and fear the taxmen, they don't want the government delving into their affairs too much and creating problems for them, physical assets such as apartments are very easy to find and cannot be hidden. If this sector suffers, thousands of people (bricklayers, painters, steel workers etc.) will be unemployed and it will affect the GDP and the economy. The point of the recent press conference was to highlight that the government is scaring the general public away from making purchases in real estate and other sectors and it may cost them in terms of employment. Why would the politicians live in an apartment anyway, when so many have grabbed land and had benefited from illegal plot allocations?
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