GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Traf­fic en­ter­ing the Hilton ho­tel, Port-of-Spain was re­duced to a crawl on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, as scores of peo­ple at­tend­ed Re­pub­lic Bank's home own­er­ship event hop­ing to se­cure their own prop­er­ty.

They sought ad­vice from the bank's mort­gage spe­cial­ists as well as re­al es­tate agents, de­vel­op­ers, lawyers and val­u­a­tors who were al­so on hand.

Some hope­ful home­own­ers told Guardian Me­dia they were fed up of rent­ing.

"My rent keeps go­ing up every year and the land­lord is not up­grad­ing the place," one per­son said.

Re­ba Kalloo, an­oth­er at­tendee, said while she was al­ready qual­i­fied for a mort­gage, she want­ed to raise her fam­i­ly in a safe place.

"With crime be­ing so ram­pant in the coun­try we have to take every­thing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion," she said.

Shed­ley Branche, RBL's re­gion­al sales man­ag­er com­mer­cial and re­tail bank­ing said the fact that so many peo­ple came to the event showed a need in the hous­ing mar­ket.

"Peo­ple want homes and pos­si­bly they can't get it. We are see­ing an in­creas­ing de­mand for home­own­er­ship. Prob­a­bly the de­mand is not be­ing filled by sub­sidised hous­ing and clear­ly, the pri­vate sec­tor has to play a part in meet­ing that de­mand," Branche ad­vised.

He said the age for first time home­own­er­ship ranged from those in their 20s to peo­ple in their 50s.

CEO/di­rec­tor of re­al es­tate com­pa­ny Ter­ra Trinidad, Jean Paul de Meil­lac, not­ed that while the cur­rent en­vi­ron­ment is con­ducive to pur­chas­ing prop­er­ty, giv­en the in­cen­tives avail­able, it is dif­fi­cult for a de­vel­op­er to pro­duce an af­ford­able prod­uct for the first time home­own­er.

"There is lim­it­ed land, lim­it­ed in­fra­struc­ture, the cost of con­struc­tion is high, the labour pool is chal­leng­ing and then the bu­reau­cra­cy in­volved in get­ting fi­nal com­ple­tions on a de­vel­op­ment and ap­provals through­out the process just takes the car­ry­ing costs too far for the de­vel­op­er and that cost is then passed on to the pur­chas­er," de Meil­lac ex­plained.

He said, ide­al­ly, with com­bined in­comes peo­ple can qual­i­fy for prop­er­ty rang­ing be­tween $1.5 to $1.7 mil­lion.

Go­ing for­ward, de Meil­lac said there should be in­cen­tives for the con­struc­tion in­dus­try like re­mov­ing VAT from cer­tain items and ad­dress­ing the red tape to make the ap­proval process eas­i­er.