A top-ranking developer has alerted that the Bahamas could fall further than 77th in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings unless it reforms the Planning and Subdivisions Act, which has “drastically complicated” obtaining real estate permits.
Chairman of Arawak Homes and the Sunshine Group, Franklyn Wilson, told Tribune Business that the Government needed to upend its promises to “repeal or amend” parts of the Planning and Subdivisions Act because of the rising land developers cost.
Mr. Wilson addressed the Bahamas’ continual shortcoming in the annual Ease of Doing Business rankings and indicated that this nation was “going in the wrong direction”.
The Bahamas has failed five spots year-after-year in the report’s annual rankings, dropping from 63rd to 68th. The Ease of Doing Business rankings measure the simplicity of obtaining construction permits.
“The recent passage of the Subdivisions Act will be a significant negative,” Mr. Wilson told Tribune Business. “It has complicated drastically the nature of getting permits. The process of getting permits is far more complicated today.
As the time, the real estate sector as a whole, this was the problem they had with that Act, and that has not gone away.”
The Planning and Subdivisions Act was originally passed into law under the Ingraham administration. Mr. Wilson explained that the newly-elected PLP government had committed to either amend or repeal parts of the legislation.
“What it takes to get a permit is so much more time consuming, more costly,” Mr. Wilson told Tribune Business. “That’s a specific thing. There was considerable public comment at the time saying it was not thought through sufficiently, and it’s still not been done sufficiently enough. I still think there’s a need for the matter to be reviewed.”
In examining the simplicity of obtaining construction permits in the Bahamas, the Ease of Doing Business Report looked at the number of procedures, and time taken to obtain them, that would be required to legally build a $1.2 million warehouse on a greenfield site in Nassau.
According to The Tribune, based on this, the report found: “According to data collected by Doing Business, dealing with construction permits there requires 14 procedures, takes 178 days and costs 27.8 per cent of income per capita.”
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