Govt reduces real estate registration fee

The government has reduced the registration fee in the real estate sector in an attempt to smooth out the effect of Covid-19 pandemic and to provide a decent benefit to buyers.

The Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs on Thursday issued a gazette notification in this regard.

As per the notification, this reduction would bring the effective registration cost down to 10 percent, which was 14 percent before December last.

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

The real estate buyer, due to the changes, will pay 1 percent of the property price as the registration fee, 1.5 percent as stamp duty, 3 percent as VAT and 2 percent as the local government tax.

The first vice president of Real Estate & Housing Association of Bangladesh (REHAB) Liakat Ali Bhuiyan has welcomed the move saying it will help the sector turn around in the midst of the current coronavirus crisis.

He said the present situation is a bolt from the blue for the entrepreneurs as well as the 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.

Even in the beginning of 2020, the real estate sector was beaming with hope as demands for flats and plots from customers seemed to increase, Bhuiyan said.

It is now uncertain where the situation will take the realtors, whose fates are connected with over 200 linkage industriessuch as, steel rod, cement, ceramic ware and bricketc, he added.

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