Mala Yasin, a Kurdish investor and construction company owner, said the Iraqi government provides generous housing loans that attracts many of its citizens to buy housing units in their own areas.
The Iraqi government has decided to close all camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and has also defunded Arabic schools that once benefited those who fled their homes due to the war against the Islamic State (ISIS) and the sectarian conflict that engulfed the country in the 2000s. Yasin argued that these factors forced the Arab people living in the Kurdistan Region to return.
He said that Kurdish investors and construction companies with decades of experience have directed their work southward to Iraq, and that Kurdish companies top the Iraqi market.
A Rudaw investigation with top real estate company Baghy Shaqlawa in the Kurdistan Region revealed that the purchase of housing units by Iraqi real estate agencies has reached almost zero.
However, Arabs continue to buy housing units in Kurdish cities. A lawyer of the company said that of 11 contracts recently signed in one of their branches, nine were Arabs.
Official figures from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Investment Board shows that about 214,000 housing units have been built in the Kurdistan Region since 2006, including more than 105,000 apartments, over 92,000 houses, and about 17,000 villas.
Most housing units were built in Erbil, followed by Sulaimani and Duhok respectively.
Yasin said that the worsening economic situation and austerity measures in the Kurdistan Region since 2014 caused by the war against ISIS, the drop in oil prices, and budget cuts by Baghdad meant that local Kurdish people struggled to obtain the financial resources to engage with the housing market. It also meant that the KRG had to cut all types of loans to its citizens, including for housing and marriage.
With ISIS sweeping through swathes of the country, the lack of security and stability in the central and southern parts of Iraq at the time compelled Arabs to head towards the Kurdistan Region, and many of them bought houses and apartments in Kurdish cities.
“The demand for housing in the Kurdistan Region has been decreasing for two years, and now it has reached a decline of 80 to 90 percent in Erbil, Sulaimani, and Duhok provinces,” Yasin said.
The volume of investment in the Kurdistan Region reached $40 billion between 2006 and 2013, Yasin stated, explaining that many of the same investors have now decided to make investments in the Iraqi market.
