Condo winners complain as many new condos need massive renovation

New condominium homes transferred under the 40/60 program have already had doors, windows, ceramic floors, kitchen and toilet materials demolished and replaced due to poor quality materials, Capital learned after a recent visit to homes.
Addis Ababa Saving Houses Development Enterprise (AASHDE) spent more than 150,000 birr per house to install finishing materials and so far 90 percent of the homes have had them replaced.
AASHDE engineers said that over 130 million birr in ceramic and other materials have been demolished at Crown and SengaTera sites.
An elderly lady who met Capital while she was demolishing the door said that the finishing materials in her house were made with poor quality.
“We paid nearly one million birr to CBE for this house but the government is using low quality materials for our house and most of the people are replacing them with better quality materials.”
Tameru Abera, an engineering expert said the people are changing the material so they can sell the condos at a better price.
“The condominiums are not being used as indented, the 40/60 scheme was started for the middle class but people are paying from 800,000 to one million birr and then they are renovating them. The government should not have registered these people in this program, it is better for them to buy land and to construct their own home.”
Capital asked Yohannes Abayneh AASHDE Communication head about the quality of the finishing materials and why the enterprise did not let the house owners do the work themselves.
“We are fixing the materials based on the design, we can’t work like the five star hotels, what we fix has to take into consideration the money we have. Our agreement is with CBE and they are commanding us to do the finishing work.’’
The prices of the 972 recently transferred houses will soon increase by 124,000 birr. The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia says this additional cost is just an interest payment.
With the increase two-bedroom buyers will add 91,470 birr and three and four bedroom buyers will add 110, 650 and 124,000 birr respectively to the total prices of the homes.
Currently 38,000 of houses in the 40/ 60 program are under construction.