By Kemol King
United States President Donald Trump earlier this month announced a plan to bar corporations and institutional investors from buying single-family homes, in line with some sentiment that ordinary Americans should not have to compete with deep-pocketed entities that can hoard supply to turn properties into high-yield assets. Whatever one thinks of Trump, the premise is difficult to dismiss. When deep-pocketed buyers run unchecked, ordinary people can often be the first to be priced out.
Guyana today is facing a problem similar to that, shaped by its own circumstances. Since first oil in December 2019, the country has experienced years of double-digit economic growth, driven by the massive offshore investments of oil companies, alongside a broader surge in private-sector activity. Expats have arrived in growing numbers. Businesses are expanding. Demand for land, housing, and commercial space has increased. The result has been predictable. Prices for land, homes and rentals have climbed sharply, in many cases reaching levels far beyond what ordinary Guyanese can reasonably afford.
This pressure has landed on a housing system that was already strained. For years, the Ministry of Housing struggled with a severe backlog of tens of thousands of house-lot applications, with some applicants waiting decades for approval. When the new government took office in 2020, one of its most tangible achievements was accelerating the house-lot programme to address what it said was a backlog of over 75,000 housing applications. Oil revenues and the wider economic momentum created fiscal space for the government to invest in land development at scale, including roads, drainage, electricity, and telecommunications. This created the conditions for them to provide Guyanese with an alternative to an overheated private market by offering serviced house lots at subsidized rates they could realistically afford.
The government did not only distribute land. It also began constructing homes, ranging from low-income units to larger “young professional” houses, typically three and four bedroom designs meant to serve young Guyanese people keen on building families. These are attractive, seemingly well-built homes that help widen access to homeownership and ease social pressure created by the boom.
But there is a problem.
Increasingly, advertisements appear offering what are clearly government-built young professional homes for sale or rent at exorbitant prices. Some beneficiaries appear to be flipping these houses for quick profit. In others, they are rented out at rates that seem to defeat the entire purpose of the government’s housing programme. One realtor is currently circulating an advert on social media, offering one of the young professional homes at Little Diamond for $75 million. Under the programmes the government has spearheaded in partnership with the banks, these homes would go for a range of $14-20 million. This is a slap in the face of thousands of Guyanese who continue to wait, and some may even die, in a queue of applications as they struggle to find a foothold in a housing market distorted by Guyana’s rapid economic growth.
It speaks to a classic symptom of the Dutch Disease. When wealth floods into an economy, prices rise faster than income for many citizens, and essential needs like housing become unaffordable. The government’s housing programme is one of the policy tools actively pushing back against that dynamic. This critical social stabilizer is now being undermined by realtors and other unscrupulous beneficiaries.
When someone receives priority access to a government-built house while thousands of applicants remain in the backlog, only to resell or rent that house at inflated prices, the outcome is plainly unfair. If the beneficiary did not truly need the home, someone else almost certainly did. Renting out such a house simply shifts the burden onto another Guyanese, forcing them to pay someone else’s mortgage when they could have been the homeowner themselves.
This kind of behaviour makes Guyanese people cynical. Young people already feel disillusioned as they try to build a life in a country that promised its oil wealth would create a pathway to prosperity. Seeing state-supported homes converted into profit-making schemes reinforces the idea that the system is being gamed. It might be useful for the government to develop a system that distinguishes applicants who need, from applicants who want, as opposed to simply relying on a queue determined by the date of application.
Guyana’s oil boom has created opportunities that previous generations could not imagine. Ensuring that those opportunities translate into secure, affordable housing for ordinary citizens requires action to be taken to prevent abuses. The lawlessness must stop.
What is the government going to do about it?
