Housing Boom

by Esther (Iran)

There are something like 100,000 empty apartments in northern Tehran. In our 5-storey building, 2 floors are empty. In our friend’s 14-apartment building, 6 apartments are empty. Still, rents are high and new buildings are going up every single second of every single day.

“Real estate is so expensive in Iran,” I tell our landlord. “The prices can’t stay this high.”

“I thought the same thing. I thought that the prices could not keep going up, but they do. I know. I develop property all over Tehran. It’s the oil money. Some guys are bringing in hundreds of millions of tumans every month. A lot of them can’t invest outside of Iran. They don’t know what to spend their money on, so they buy another Mercedes and another apartment. When you buy an apartment in Tehran, you pay half a million dollars one month and the other half a month later. It’s all cash here. These guys put down $60-70,000 for a car, no problem.”

“Look at Dubai: the apartments are better. The construction is better, the details are better. In Dubai, they have nothing. Nothing. They have to import dirt from Iran. Everything has to be imported. Iran has everything. We have the land, the marble, the stones, the bricks: everything we need. Still, apartments in Dubai are cheaper than apartments in Iran. Why?”

“You have four seasons,” I respond to his rhetorical question. Keivan laughs. Our landlord doesn’t get our joke. He also does not supply the answer. Why?

“In Dubai you are just renting the property for 99 years,” Keivan says.

“So what. You’ll be dead in 99 years. That’s long enough.”