According to the data collated by the State Geodetic Authority (RGA), nearly every second apartment or house in Serbia is not legalized which is a great untapped potential of the Serbian economy, the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED) has said.
“Resolving this serious, decades-long legal problems with real estate would unlock a capital worth billions of euros, enable the registration of a huge number of apartments and houses in the land register and put an end to complex cases from the past, which is why the NALED has prepared the first proposal for an all-encompassing reform in this segment”, NALED says.
The NALED’s new study, which was written with the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), under the auspices of the Public Procurement Procedures and Good Management for Greater Competitiveness project, was submitted to the line ministries. The study also proposes solutions to the issues of legalizing illegally built facilities, upgrading the procedures of land replotting and expropriation, digitizing urban planning through the implementation of the eSpace (eProstor) system, real estate lien, public property management, real estate taxation, dealing with the problems related to publicly owned land and other procedures.
Dusan Vasiljevic, Competitiveness and Investments Director at the NALED, points out that the study provides solutions for decades-long problems, providing there is a strong will and determination of the state institutions to work on the problem.
“There are 2 million illegal facilities in Serbia and another 2.7 million which are not listed in the land register for various reasons. At the current pace, the process of legalization would take 40 years to complete and the losses that the state, citizens and businesses suffer because of it are already enormous. That is why we propose to have mass legalization wherever possible, with the implementation of clear measures which would stop further illegal construction. For the other real estate group, we need to include legal experts and form special commissions which would work on the convalidation and verification of old and incomplete documentation, so that the registration of all unregistered real estate would be done based on that,” Vasiljevic concluded.
(eKapija, 1.11.2023)
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