TIRANA, Jan. 14 – Buying an apartment in Albania is easy and cheap compared to other European countries, but one should think twice before making the decision. Hundreds of people have lost their life savings reserving their apartments in Tirana and other major cities while they are still under construction only to find out that their homes only to find out the same apartment has been sold to more than one party.
The only thing the cheated buyers can do is take legal action with other victims of the scheme as often the fraudulent construction entrepreneurs disappear without trace or claim they have not signed contracts with the clients.
The latest case was registered just outside Tirana where a construction entrepreneur has disappeared without trace after reportedly having cheated 36 people, taking in €1 million through multiple sales.
Prosecutors have launched an investigation into Hajdin Zyberaj, 48, after lawsuits filed by dozens of cheated buyers in the apartment block he has built in Tirana’s outskirts, near the Dajti Mountain area.
The problem is that Zyberaj is reported to have left Albania in October 2013, and most apartments have been seized by a bank he had borrowed from.
The fraud scheme unveils another issue — that of notaries public failing to detect multiple sales of a single apartment because of lack of a sales register.
“We cannot verify whether an apartments has been previously sold or not. Notary public [practitioners] make a sales contract which verifies the signing parties but cannot check whether the apartment has been previously sold or not because of lack of a register on construction permits,” Mimoza Sadushi, the head of the Notary Chamber, told a local television station.
Some 100 people are reported to have been cheated in multiple apartment sales only in Tirana for 2014.
Having been one of the key drivers of Albania’s growth in the pre-crisis decade, the construction sector has been one of the hardest hit in the past five global crisis years.
Declining remittances, tighter lending standards on home loans and lower number of construction permits have considerably affected this sector which used to be one of the key drivers of Albania’s average growth of 6 percent annually in the pre-crisis decade.
INSTAT data shows the construction sector accounted for 12.2 percent of the GDP at the end of 2013 down from a record 18 percent in 2008 just before the onset of the global financial crisis.
The standstill in this sector is also unveiled by a recent survey conducted by the central bank, revealing that a record high of two-thirds of real estate agents reported they had failed to sell any property in 2014.
