Regarding the impact of tax law implementation for vacant houses on housing market, Seyyed Mohsen Tabatabaei Mozdabadi, the secretary of IUESA said, “It is nearly two years that housing market experiences recession and it is not predicted to exit it in near future and even it is possible to be intensified this recession. Major part of this downturn is due to the government’s contractionary fiscal policies and it has caused reduce financial capability of ordinary people to buy house and as a result construction statistics and housing sales have decreased.

Emphasizing that housing market, like other markets, follows the rule of supply and demand, he said, one of the current recession reasons of housing market is lack of owners and mass producers’ interest in selling houses built as capital good. Some investors could obtain huge profits in housing market in the past decade. In current condition, house builders are not willing to reduce their marginal benefit and they have proceeded to hoard housing.

Tax for vacant house is common in many developed countries. The government should remove housing from capital good and approval and notification of the amendment of direct taxes has created the possibility. It is supposed to collect tax for more than one million empty houses in 2016. It can lead owners of vacant houses to sell or hire them.

According to statistical information, there were more than 1.5 million empty houses in country. It is necessary to evaluate again in this field in order to eliminate some concerns in this area. Granted facilities to housing have been more than 10.4 trillion dollars in the first 4 months of 2014, but over the same period in 2015, this number has reached to 9.5 billion dollars.

It is necessary to increase bank supports of housing projects. According to the statistics, construction licenses has decreased 52.3% compared to the last year in Tehran in 2014 and it shows 41.7% decline in the country. Therefore, it is not expected to increase construction growth without facility support.

 Source : Tasnim News Agency