Anisul Islam Noor :The real estate and housing sector has suffered losses of about Tk 2,539.2 crore in last 69 days due to blockade and hartal, said REHAB President Alamgir Shamsul Alamin.About 20 lakh construction workers have by this time lost their jobs and several hundred developer companies have been closed. The total housing sector is now in disarray on account of the ongoing political unrest, Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh chief said. More than 50 thousand flats are lying unsold. About 90 percent developers, who took loans from the banks, have failed to pay installments regularly or the loan repayment dates of some of them have become overdue. The industry now faces disaster.Many linkage companies grew in the country with the expansion of the housing and real-state sector in last 20 years. Of them, cement factories, re-rolling mills, brick fields, stone supply factories, mixture industries, colour and painting, electrical electronics appliances, furniture factories construction related transport companies and sand suppliers have been badly affected.Many developers have failed to complete the construction work in time. As a result, delivery of flats to the buyers is being delayed.” Such delay can create many legal complexities,” said REHAB President. Besides, those who invested their capital in this sector, are not in a position to start new business in other sectors, he added.Most of the apartment buyers belong to the middle and the lower income group of people. If delivery of flats is delayed, they will be troubles, Alamgir Shamsul Alamin said. He said, the real estate owners have taken loans amounting to Tk24, 000 crore and many of them are now in the risk of being defaulters. Mustafa Kamal Mohiuddin, President of Bangladesh Land Developers Association (BLDA), said that investment of about Tk5,000 crore had got stranded in the sector due to the political turmoilAbu Bakar Siddique, General Secretary of Bangladesh Re-Rolling Mills Association said, 200 mills out of 400 have stopped production, as they cannot sell products.The production time has been reduced to half in the remaining 200 mills, he said adding that they cannot import raw materials for production due to the unrest. Abu Bakar said that they had to slash jobs of a number of workers to reduce costs. The terminated workers had been, however, given some payments.Bangladesh Paint Manufacturers Association President Abdur Rahman have, therefore, urged the political parties to save from incurring losses.
