Housing developers praise new measures to revitalise real estate market

AMMAN — The Jordan Housing Developers Association (JHDA) on Thursday said that the Cabinet’s decisions to revitalise the real estate market will play a key role in boosting the sector’s trading activities, which dropped by 24 per cent in the first two months of this year.

“We have been calling these measures for a very long time... The new measures by the Cabinet are of great importance for all investors in the sector and will directly benefit buyers,” JHDA President Zuhair Omari told The Jordan Times.

“We submitted a plan to the government a few months ago to boost trading in the sector, and the measures announced this week are in line with it,” he added.

On Wednesday, the Cabinet endorsed a number of procedures aimed at revitalising the real estate market, currently in slowdown.

The Cabinet also approved a decision to lower the basic price offering of real estate by 20 per cent, so that it better aligns with the market value.

As such, fees and taxes pertaining to the sale of real estate will be mitigated due to the decrease in the estimated value of land and the increased number of parcelling-out and ownership-transfer transactions.

Under the new changes, citizens will now be exempt from fees levied on ownership transfer and the consensual parcelling out of land, which would facilitate the process of transferring land ownership from the deceased to their living inheritors.

“Buyers will pay fewer fees now when buying a plot of land and the 4-dunum land parcelling system will make it easier to sell large plots of lands,” he added.

Omari called for lowering the interest rate on housing loans, which he said will play a significant role in improving trading in the sector.

Trade volume in the Kingdom’s real estate market during the first two months of 2019 dropped to JD695 million, compared with JD914 million in the same period last year, according to the Department of Land and Survey.