Government is exploring the creation of a housing price index to document the sale of properties to capture the range of options available to prospective buyers in the real estate market.
Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Affairs and Investment, Ryan Straughn, stated this on Thursday, as he addressed local, regional, and international participants attending the two-day Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the International Property Tax Institute’s 10th Caribbean Valuation and Construction Conference, at Hilton Barbados Resort.
Mr. Straughn underscored the importance of accurate data, while pointing out that stakeholders must work together to provide the correct data without “prejudice to any data privacy issues to allow people to achieve their financial objectives”.
The Minister stressed that the contribution of the real estate market to the economy was significant, and the rate of return on such investments required teamwork to market the region globally, in light of the vulnerabilities to climate change.
“And therefore, we will work together with the stakeholders in the Ministry of Housing, and with respect to the digitisation of the Land Registry, to bring closure to financial transactions in the shortest possible time. One of the challenges which I’m sure many of you in this room are acutely aware [of] is that [it] takes too long to execute a financial transaction, in relation to property in the country.
“As we digitise, not just on the revenue side, but with the Land Registry… and the entire system… to allow for free exchange of information across the system to achieve an objective where within seven to 14 days we can close a transaction. That requires a significant amount of change management, investments in digitisation, to ensure that all the necessary data related to [land] titles that it is clean and that is something that the government is working on right now… to be able to do that,” Mr. Straughn stated.
Underscoring the importance of the conference, the Minister maintained that it opened opportunities for small states, like Barbados, to be fully integrated in the global real estate market and to achieve results that “hitherto, we were unable to do”.
“These technical interventions, are very important…. We have, in recent times, changed our land tax portal in respect of making payments. We encourage persons to go there because it gives you full control, with respect to seeing all of the data related to your property, and more [changes] will come as part of the digitisation thrust.
“The Ministry of Finance and the Barbados Revenue Authority, working with the other partners, will roll out [the upgrades] over the course of the next few years, to ensure that the true potential of the real estate market can be achieved,” he underlined.
Mr. Straughn also said that he wants to see an “evolution” of the real estate market among more Barbadians, insisting that it remained one of the areas still to be developed to ensure that property could be passed on and create generational wealth
“Barbadians believe that you have to own a piece of the rock and that is something that is engrained in us. But, how do we utilise those resources to ensure that families and communities can, from one generation to the next, create wealth and pass [it] on?
“This is to ensure that we are able to build much more resilient communities and families to ensure that the country, as a whole, can respond to the climate crisis that we are seeing globally and create the structures that allows ordinary people to benefit from mobilising those resources to deliver a greater rate of return for our people,” the Minister said.