Tehran, Iran, October 16
By Mehdi Sepahvand –- Trend:
A lot is being heard in Iran that most construction contractors have a good hand in cutting corners and submitting shams of houses and apartments to people.
It usually takes no longer than a few months for the shackles to start going loose around the seams and revealing to the owners of the building how they have been robbed by the jerry builder they hired.
But it seems that owners and buyers of the houses and apartments are not the only victims. Trend has found out that the same issue is one of the biggest concerns of investors in the housing sector in Iran, even in the luxury sector.
In a private meeting of over 20 luxury real estate developers of Shemiranat, northern Tehran, October 15, the issue was hotly debated.
Although the topic of the meeting was union-style cooperation among the attendees, the issue of jerry builders emerged briefly into the meeting and remained one of the most hotly discussed topics throughout.
The common complaint of these luxury real estate developers was that they have been swindled by people they hired as construction contractors.
“Later I found he had not imported any doorknobs from Italy as he had promised, had cut corners in building the frame, and skipped this or that around many other corners,” one of the attendees of the meeting said.
The good news from this meeting, however, was that the group decided to launch an online application where they can collectively develop a list of blacklisted contractors in order to avoid hiring them in the future.
Over the past years, Iranians have been sharing video footages of newly-built buildings falling down or starting to show signs of it. One of the most famous buildings whose video footages showed it falling flat on one side belonged to the infamous Mehr housing project, a government-pushed megaproject of the Ahmadinejad administration.
According to official reports, 4.4 million housing units started being built under Mehr during Ahmadinejad.
The sensitive issue goes beyond developers and owners losing money, and finds strong reverberations in many areas ranging from insurance industry to environment.