Individual Housing: Built in 90 Days, Commissioned in 150

With frame construction technology (very common in America and Europe), building a house takes 3 months.

In Kazakhstan, however, the hard part is not building the house but commissioning it. Ours is the only country where, if you follow the letter of the law, commissioning takes longer than construction.

The problem is that commissioning an individual housing construction (IHC) project goes through roughly the same procedure as multi-unit housing construction. But a multi-unit project commissions 100 or 200 apartments at once, while an individual project covers one to four.

The President has now drawn attention to the need to build more individual housing by developing infrastructure and transferring land to private individuals.

But private developers have problems of their own. They:

• build without a design project
• build haphazardly, with no unified architectural style
• will increase the workload of akimats, utility companies and Public Service Centers (PSCs) at the commissioning stage
• will bring problems with design projects and with compliance of houses with building codes (SNiP)

In short, there will be a great many problems. Before the Nurly Zher program is adopted, these problems need to be solved. The best approach is to use single private developers on each plot, so that houses follow a uniform style and are commissioned according to all the rules.

But most important, the procedures for commissioning and for buying out land under individual housing must be simplified.

Now look at how long commissioning and the land buyout take. All figures are in working days:

1. Preparation of the technical passport – 5 working days
2. Declaration of compliance with utility services – 14 working days
3. Opinion of technical and author supervision – 2 working days
4. Submission of the facility acceptance certificate to the State Architectural and Construction Control (GASK) and receipt of GASK's cover letter – 3 days
5. Submission of the acceptance certificate with GASK's cover letter to the Architecture Department for registration – 3 days
6. Registration of the acceptance certificate at the PSC – 5 working days
7. Issuance of the address certificate and preparation of the technical passport for the apartment – 5 working days
8. Letter to the akimat requesting the land plot buyout and receipt of the akim's resolution on sale – 30 working days
9. Valuation of the property right at NPC Zem – 10 working days
10. Land purchase and sale agreement – 3 working days
11. Payment of the land buyout and receipt of a certificate from the Tax Committee – 10 working days
12. Preparation of the land management project at NPC Zem – 6 working days
13. Submission of all documents to the PSC to obtain title documents – 5 working days

The total comes to 101 WORKING DAYS! And that is if everything goes perfectly and nobody causes delays, such as the akimat or the Ministry of Justice (which often makes mistakes in documents, forcing you to go through the same steps and deadlines again).

In calendar days, that is 142 days, not counting public holidays. With holidays, it averages 150 days. In practice, it takes 6–8 months.

So a house takes 90 days to build and 150 days to commission.

This is bureaucracy at its worst, an inefficient business process that needs to be simplified. It should fit within 1 month, and only then will it be efficient.

For a private developer, this is a matter of capital turnover. Until a house is commissioned, it cannot be sold, and the money is frozen.

And money costs money. Even at 14% per annum, interest alone raises costs by at least 7%. So simply by streamlining paperwork, we can cut the cost price by 7%, and at the same time bring far more housing into service.

That is why, when Nurly Zher is being drafted, I ask you to take this fact into account. Commissioning must never take longer than construction.