The National Research Institute will officially launch a review of the Housing and Property Policy this week.
The report was completed with the support of the Department of Treasury and contains a comprehensive assessment of the sector.
The review covers policies from pre-independence to the present and highlights on the shortage of affordable housing to meet the needs of a rapidly growing urban population in the country.
The review will be launched on Tuesday (18th October) at the NRI Conference Centre in Port Moresby.
In 2010, a similar report was conducted by the Independent Consumer & Competition Commission (ICCC) titled The PNG Housing and Real Estate Industry Review.
The review recognised high prices and lack of affordability as symptoms of the following significant underlying failures of:
- Inefficient and insufficient supply of ‘raw’ land (‘portions’);
- The conditions of its allocation to developers, which are neither transparent, nor based on objective criteria to encourage competition and efficiency at every stage of the vertical chain;
- Organisational deficiencies;
- And lack of clarity of Government policy, which, in turn, creates the conditions for divergent, and often conflicting, initiatives on housing, by various arms of Government.
The former review recommended a holistic approach to the problem of housing scarcity, which it described at that time, reached crisis proportions.