Govt Reduces Real Estate Registration Fee

The Government has reduced the registration fee in the real estate sector in an attempt to ease the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and to provide investors with a fair profit.

On Thursday, the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs issued a gazette notice in this regard.

According to the notice, this decrease would bring the effective cost of registration down to 10%, which was 14 per cent until last December.

From now on, purchasers of land or land worth Tk 1 crore will have to pay Tk 10 lakh as registration costs, including stamp, registration fee, Value Added Tax ( VAT) and local government tax, which was Tk 14 lakh a year previously.

Due to the changes, the real estate owner will pay 1 per cent of the land price as registration fee, 1.5 per cent as stamp duty, 3 per cent as VAT and 2 per cent as local government tax.

The first vice president of the Real Estate & Housing Association of Bangladesh (REHAB) Liakat Ali Bhuiyan supported the decision to support the sector transform around in the middle of the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

He said that the new scenario is a blue bolt for both entrepreneurs and workers in the real estate sector.

“The sector was just getting revitalised in the recent time after a spell of recession between 2012 and 2018," he said.

He mentioned that a total of 3.5 million people in the sector have lost their jobs and investments are facing uncertainty due to the hit of the ongoing pandemic.

Also at the beginning of 2020, the real estate sector was beaming with optimism, as consumers ' expectations for apartments and plots appeared to increase, Bhuiyan said.

It is now unclear that the condition will be confronted by realtors whose fate is connected to more than 200 linkage industries, such as steel rods, cements, ceramics and bricks, etc., he added.