SANTO DOMINGO.- A real estate analyst said today the country loses investments in the millions in housing and building construction annually, because of delays in getting the projects’ blueprints approved.

The architect Kalil Michel Presbot said the approval of a project takes as long as two years between the various agencies, for which an urgent solution is needed. "It’s a shame that promotional real estate desists from investing in the construction of houses and apartments in the country, because the process  approve blueprints any project takes from 14 to 24 months, in the city councils and the SEOPC (Public Works). And that’s inadmissible."

He said faced with those delays the promoter can neither get bank financing for their construction, nor constitute the regime of condominiums, or get the housing units’ deed certificates, until the blueprints are properly approved. "More than 70 percent of the private housing projects begun in most cases get built without the approved construction blueprints, which makes the project’s financial management very difficult.”

Michel said the country becomes “less competitive and discourages the local or foreign investor who flees, and prefers not to take the risk in Dominican Republic."

He said most of the country’s red tape has been eradicated, except the transaction of blueprints, reason enough to for the Housing and Urban Development Law to be approved. "Currently the paperwork in most public and government agencies is fast and precise in any direction, these actions are done even via Internet, but the transaction of blueprints looks like a backward exercise, how documents were handled at the start of the 20th century.”