Prime Minister James Marape wants to see the National Housing Corporation (NHC) become the richest real estate company in the country.
The National Housing Corporation has a huge asset base however, all properties are not fully accounted for.
Most properties have run down and are unfit for human occupation.
Housing Minister Justin Tkatchenko said: “This is the problem, we don’t know how many properties, how many houses NHC and also under NHEL (National Housing Estate Ltd) actually own.”
PM Marape said: “We’ve asked them to do an asset inventory, we’ve asked them to deploy a program that can be less burden to the national budget but using the asset that they have to empower and grow NHC and finance the housing needs of our citizens.”
The Housing Minister said while the Prime Minister wants the potential of the NHC assets utilized as one of the biggest real estate companies, they must have good quality houses.
“We’ve gotta have good quality,” stated Tkatchenko.
“Safe house for people to rent and live in. We just cannot continue the way we are going. On that side we have a lot of work to do but when it comes to ensuring we have a proper asset base, I have given instruction to the management.
“They have set a special task force, they have done internally with the Lands Department with the provincial governments.”
With no proper database system in NHC, the minister intends to also create a database and scanning centre for all housing records.
“I will be initiating the same process here, in the NHC to correctly electronically scan every single document for future documents so nothing can be destroyed, nothing can be lost and nothing can be corrupted.”
(Housing Minister Justin Tkatchenko with Prime Minister James Marape today at NHC)