The five-year-in-the-making National Data System of Real Estate and Housing was unveiled in a ceremony on Tuesday with Roads and Urban Development Minister Mohammad Eslami in attendance.
The real-estate tracker would help the Iranian National Tax Administration tax property owners who keep their homes vacant.
Homes may be empty because they are secondary homes or are bought as investments by real-estate speculators.
The minister says he is hopeful of cooperation from all organizations and state agencies in providing the needed information, IRNA reported.
According to Mahmoud Mahmoudzadeh, the head of the ministry’s housing division, currently more than 2.6 million homes in Iran and 500,000 in Tehran are empty.
“The number of empty homes in Iran is three times more than the global average,” he says, adding that bringing 40% of empty homes into the tenancy market would help meet the housing needs of Tehran’s residents.
“Like all other countries, residential units must be considered durable consumer goods instead of capital goods. More than 75-80% of vacant homes across the country have been tracked,” he was quoted as saying by News.mrud.ir last month.
Lack of an accurate database on real-estate properties has been the main reason for the government’s failure to levy tax on homes and lands. Housing experts, however, believe that putting together such databanks for executive agencies is easy.
Economy Minister Farhad Dejpasand said that in order to curb speculative practices, value added tax will also be charged on real-estate land as of next year, as land accounts for 60-70% of the end price of homes and the VAT rate on land will be particularly high to rid the real-estate market of unscrupulous land owners and dealers.
