Unplanned boom

PANAMA. Panama’s real estate industry has finally acknowledges lack of planning. The president of the brokers association (ACOBIR) Osvaldo Marchena, said it’s necessary to create a development plan that all sectors involved would help develop and follow.

Marchena said the next step for Panama is to compete with larger real estate markets like Singapore and New York in the race to attract multinational company headquarters.

Jose Gabriel Montenegro, commercial consultant and director of House, agrees with Marchena about planning the development to achieve sustained growth. In the recent real estate boom there was a lot of improvisation, “ people built what they wanted not minding where and without market studies”, he said.

A total of 263,711 square meters of class A offices were built in the last two years, an increase of 110.4 percent from the previous period.

The wave of retirees from the US and Canada and the Venezuelan political crisis helped cushion a negative impact from the improvised boom.

Although the market has begun to stabilize there are still a few spots in the city where projects could be developed. The truth is that even with projects like the canal expansion and the metro the real estate industry must re-adjust. Sales have folded in half with only 7,656 units sold from the boom of 16,000 units sold yearly.