Due to the rules imposed during the last few
months in Argentina, the real estate business has been affected. Since November
2011, when the impediment to exchange pesos for dollars and other currencies appeared,
the real estate business began to decrease. Month by month, the situation has
not improved; nonetheless, specialists in the area are looking for different
ways of solving the situation.
The biggest problem is that sellers want
dollars and buyers can’t get them. This has caused the real estate transactions
to freeze. Moreover, this has not only affected transactions, since, during the
last month, the construction authorizations have also decreased. According to
Carlos Sotelo, vice-president of the “Colegio de Corredores Inmobiliarios de
Capital Federal” (Real Estate broker’s association), thinks that “we shouldn’t
forget that if the real estate market freezes, the main industry, the construction,
will fall; and the latter has been vital to the economy after the crisis in
2002.”
According to the statistics, the situation
doesn’t seem to get better, rather the contrary. For this reason, the real
estate business is looking for solutions in order to unlock the situation. One
of these solutions is the “pesificación” (turn the dollar transactions into
Argentine pesos).
According to Fernando Lago, director of the
“Camara Argentina de la Construcción” (Construction Association in Argentina),
the tendency to turn the contracts from dollars into pesos “is already generalized
and so it is the launching of new ones in pesos”. The problem is that the
option of paying installments in pesos is valid when the construction is done from
zero, since the owners of houses that have already been built, want dollars.
To conclude, while the impediment to buy
dollars or other currencies continues, and so the imposition over imports of
goods for construction, the real estate business will continue to be affected,
and the property transactions and construction will continue to decrease.
Nonetheless, the brokers and specialists are trying to find new ways of solving
this problem.
