Young pro­fes­sion­als in Trinidad and To­ba­go are strug­gling to nav­i­gate the mine­field that is the re­al es­tate mar­ket in the coun­try.

In a Busi­ness Guardian re­port last week, pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Re­al Es­tate Agents of T&T, Sal­ly Singh con­firmed that there was sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in be­com­ing a home­own­er be­tween the ages of 25 and 40.

How­ev­er, she ex­plained, there are sev­er­al ob­sta­cles stacked against many with­in that age range.

“A crit­i­cal con­cern in the cur­rent re­al es­tate en­vi­ron­ment is the af­ford­abil­i­ty cri­sis fac­ing young pro­fes­sion­als aged 25 to 40. De­spite a steady lev­el of in­ter­est in home­own­er­ship among this group, ac­tu­al pur­chas­es re­main low. High prop­er­ty prices, strin­gent mort­gage qual­i­fi­ca­tion cri­te­ria and lim­it­ed af­ford­able hous­ing op­tions have placed home­own­er­ship out of reach for many,” Singh said.

She not­ed that most prop­er­ties on the mar­ket were priced over $1 mil­lion, which in it­self dis­qual­i­fied sev­er­al peo­ple in this age range, based on their salaries.

“In many cas­es, prop­er­ties priced un­der $1 mil­lion are fix­er-up­pers, and the cost of up­grad­ing these homes makes them not on­ly un­af­ford­able but al­so un­at­trac­tive to this seg­ment, who are pri­mar­i­ly seek­ing mod­ern, new­ly built homes,” said the re­al es­tate agent.

The Busi­ness Guardian reached out to a few peo­ple look­ing for homes and re­ceived mixed per­spec­tives on this is­sue, as some stat­ed they had out­right giv­en up, were still search­ing, or had run in­to un­ex­pect­ed prob­lems be­yond the pric­ing of the homes for which they had qual­i­fied.

The iden­ti­ties of those con­tact­ed were with­held at their re­quest.

The lat­ter was true for a 33-year-old man, Rod­er­ick, who stat­ed that he had ac­tive­ly pur­sued home­own­er­ship for over a year.

He stat­ed that af­ter seek­ing pre-ap­proval from the bank along­side his wife, they were ap­proved for a mort­gage of $890,000; a fig­ure al­ready be­low the mil­lion-dol­lar mark iden­ti­fied by Singh. He ex­plained that he has since changed jobs but has not sought a new pre-qual­i­fi­ca­tion fig­ure.

The man said there were sev­er­al sub-mil­lion hous­es list­ed on the mar­ket, but very few had ap­pealed to the cou­ple.

“As far as I re­mem­ber, one was lo­cat­ed in the Cen­tral re­gion, and we want­ed to avoid traf­fic. The oth­er was in an un­safe place,” he said, “The (first) one in the un­safe place was a house, and the oth­ers we’ve seen were apart­ments.”

The Busi­ness Guardian con­duct­ed a search of var­i­ous re­al es­tate pages for prop­er­ties that were list­ed un­der $1 mil­lion and large­ly found two and one-bed­room apart­ments in res­i­den­tial com­plex­es or fix­er-up­per hous­es, usu­al­ly in hot-spot ar­eas.

How­ev­er,Rod­er­ick said this was not the biggest chal­lenge faced by the cou­ple while search­ing for a home.

He said, “I think the biggest hur­dle was trans­paren­cy by the agents we dealt with. Ul­ti­mate­ly, the bank re­fused the prop­er­ty be­cause the ven­dor could not pro­vide a few doc­u­ments the bank re­quest­ed, name­ly the cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion.”

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he not­ed that there were oth­er costs and vari­ables that could im­pact the cou­ple in the long run.

“An­oth­er big hur­dle is the fact that the bank’s in­ter­est rate is tied to the Cen­tral Bank, there­fore, if we ob­tain a loan with a set in­stall­ment to­day, there’s a chance that it can in­crease sig­nif­i­cant­ly if the in­ter­est rate changes at the Cen­tral Bank.”

He added, “Need­ing a lawyer to go through the process is an­oth­er hur­dle, which then in­creas­es ex­pens­es. Be­cause you can’t trust most peo­ple to have in­tegri­ty and there’s a lot of le­gal jar­gon that a lay­man may not ful­ly un­der­stand. So you have to hire a lawyer to ad­vo­cate on your be­half.”

An­oth­er re­spon­dent to our query is a sin­gle woman in her mid-30s who is a mem­ber of the le­gal pro­fes­sion.

Af­ter re­cent­ly lever­ag­ing her sav­ings and re­ceiv­ing a sig­nif­i­cant amount of back­pay, the woman, Mary, stat­ed she was able to pro­vide a down pay­ment of $90,000.

She was ap­proved for a mort­gage of just un­der $2 mil­lion.

While this has widened her op­tions com­pared to many oth­ers in her age range, she ex­plained that she was on her 4th at­tempt to pur­chase a home.

She ex­plained that dis­tort­ed val­u­a­tions by “greedy” ven­dors had led to the col­lapse of the pre­vi­ous deals, as the banks once again raised con­cern about the doc­u­ments and val­u­a­tions pro­vid­ed.

The Busi­ness Guardian reached out to a res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty val­u­a­tor, who al­so spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, who con­firmed that dis­tort­ed val­ues on prop­er­ties list­ed on the mar­ket of­ten cre­at­ed an ad­di­tion­al chal­lenge for home­own­ers.

“Those prop­er­ties, they typ­i­cal­ly would have is­sues in that they wouldn’t be in the great­est con­di­tion. Banks have lend­ing cri­te­ria where res­i­dences have to be at least in av­er­age con­di­tion, or above. So av­er­age to good. But at the price range they qual­i­fy for, it could be that the house is in fair con­di­tion, or it has is­sues with re­pairs need­ed to the roof, and it needs sig­nif­i­cant work in­side to bring it up to a good stan­dard,” the val­u­a­tor ex­plained, “So that could be one rea­son why the val­u­a­tion could cause prob­lems. So, it’s not re­al­ly the val­u­a­tion, it is the con­di­tion of the prop­er­ties avail­able at the price range that that age group could af­ford.”

The val­u­a­tor, how­ev­er, be­lieves in the cou­ple’s case, it could be a case where a re­cent­ly con­struct­ed or in­com­plete prop­er­ty with in­suf­fi­cient ap­provals was list­ed on the mar­ket. The val­u­a­tor added the vast ma­jor­i­ty of prop­er­ties list­ed were on sale above their ac­tu­al val­ue.

“The banks want to lend on prop­er­ties that have all ap­provals in place. So if they do not have those ap­provals, they are not go­ing to lend on it,” the val­u­a­tor ex­plained, “Be­cause their main con­cern is when there is a de­fault on the loan, they want to be able to dis­pose of it quick­ly and get back their mon­ey. And if they don’t have ap­provals, and they run in­to all those hur­dles and so on, they won’t be able to sell the prop­er­ty eas­i­ly.”

This in­stance could oc­cur in de­vel­op­ing hous­ing projects, sev­er­al of which have popped up in re­cent years, with in­vestors list­ing in­tro­duc­to­ry prices to ear­ly buy­ers in a bid to raise funds to com­plete the en­tire de­vel­op­ment.

The val­u­a­tor agreed that most young pro­fes­sion­als were priced out of the mar­ket, as gen­er­al­ly, salaries at their lev­el did not al­low them to qual­i­fy for a rea­son­able home in the lo­cal mar­ket.