The Executive Director of the Competition Protection Authority, Dr. Abdullah Al-Owaisi, revealed that the authority is about to complete a governmental study on the residential real estate sector, after 3 months of the work of the team formed by the Authority from various stakeholders in the sector.
Al-Owaisi told a local Arabic daily that the team monitored several practices and obstacles in the real estate sector, such as the dominance of monopolistic centers on the market, and inequality between dealers, while discovering new ways to buy homes at more than their value.
The Executive Director of Competition Protection Authority (CPA) pointed out that it was found that real estate is registered in the names of others who are not the real buyers, in addition to the work of a real estate agency that cannot be isolated for the benefit of the real buyer calling it a ‘sham’.
Al-Owaisi explained that the team developed a number of recommendations and procedures to address the imbalance in the real estate market, in preparation for submitting them to the board of directors of the agency and then to the Minister of Commerce and Industry which then will be submitted to the Council of Ministers for corrective measures, including a review of real estate legislation, in order to ensure the promotion of competition and the protection of the real estate sector from money laundering operations.
The committee’s 10 recommendations include:
1 – Imposing taxes on the multiple properties of private housing.
2 – Reconsidering the vacant land tax to make it progressive.
3 – Accelerating the pace of allocating plots of land and getting rid of the overlap of competencies.
4 – Creating an integrated database for all real estate in Kuwait.
5 – Adopting the basis of unified technical criteria for evaluation in order to ensure quality.
6 – Cancellation, modification or addition of decisions that activate government oversight.
7 – Reconsidering the non-separable real estate agency and its regulation of buying and selling.
8 – Activating the municipality’s control over building violations and the exploitation of housing for investment.
9 – Approving the laws establishing the Land Authority and the owners’ union and the real estate developer.
10 – Automatic linking of the relevant authorities to facilitate the collection and transmission of data.
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