BREA Defends Belize’s Real Estate Market Amid U.S. Report

The U.S. State Department has raised concerns about investing in Belizean property, but local real estate professionals say that warning does not tell the whole story. While the industry acknowledges problems with land disputes, the registry system and transparency, it insists Belize remains a viable place to invest. The Belize Real Estate Association points to thousands of successful transactions each year and says the proposed Real Estate Agents Bill could bring greater accountability to the sector.

 

Mike Singh, President, Belize Real Estate Association

“While we acknowledge that there are some certain s- some issues with some of the things that were stated in the release by the State Department we don’t believe that it’s a sort of an overall climate issue in Belize. There are many thousands of transactions that go through without problems. What we will acknowledge is that our system is different than what Americans may be used to. We agree that our system needs to be upgraded and we do know that the government is working on digitizing the land registry and being able to move forward to where we can have more efficiency in the system. There are certainly some issues that we are working with the government on actively as an association to try to come to a meeting on agreement as to what needs to be done and how, as an industry, we can help the government. Some of the issues they spoke about are efficiency. They spoke about things – they spoke about corruption, which is something that we, of course, highly reject as an association. In fact, some of the things we’re working on is to work with the government to continue to develop the real estate bill, which will bring a lot more order into the real estate profession itself. There are two sides to inefficiency. There’s two sides to corruption. There’s two sides to bad acting and we feel that it’s unfair of us to demand that the government do things a certain way when practitioners may not be doing the same. So our goal is to build a more professional organization with professional licensed agents that are acting in the best interest of their client, and of course, in the best interest of the people of Belize. So for us it’s super important that we get this right.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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