ISLAMABAD, Dec 21: Our city managers have decided to attract international realtors to the real estate of Islamabad and ride out of their financial difficulties.

Capital Development Authority’s Member Finance Saeedur Rehman told Dawn that a team of top CDA would visit shortly the United States, the United Kingdom, Dubai and Malaysia to offer commercial and residential plots for sale in the federal capital territory.

The Authority’s financial liabilities have risen to Rs40 billion while it has just Rs6 billion in its kitty.

“Because of the current downturn in real estate prices and depreciation of the Pakistani rupee against dollar, we hope we will achieve our income earning target of between Rs12 and Rs15 billion,” said Mr Rehman who was appointed recently and given the task of preparing a new policy to run the financial affairs of the CDA.

Before undertaking the foreign tours, the CDA team would visit a real estate exhibition in Karachi to advertise “our product”.

“This will give us some idea how we should present our land in the international real estate market,” he said.

It is for the first time the city authorities will offer to the international markets the precious land of Islamabad.

The CDA usually depends on the sale of land to meet its expenditures despite the fact that several circles have been advising it to make regular income generating assets instead of selling precious land of the capital, a source in the CDA told Dawn.

The source said the authority had only Rs6 billion in its kitty and Rs2.8 billion were expected in revenue collection during the current fiscal year while it required Rs40 billion to meet liabilities.

Giving details of the revenue and expenses, the source said the CDA has to spend Rs12 billion on the on-going projects, Rs6 billion on new projects, Rs7 billion on non-development expenditure.

The CDA collected Rs13 billion from plot seekers of sector I-15 but spent on other projects. It has to repay Rs2 billion contractors’ matured securities after one year of completion of projects, he added.

The authority lost Rs2 billion in stock exchange crunch.

Analysts said the chances of success of CDA teams which will go abroad to attract investors in real estate business are very low because there is no surety that they will gain the desired results and otherwise the money on such foreign tours will become waste and put further burden on the authority.

According to reports not only Pakistan, but also most of the countries in the world including the US and the UK are presently facing acute financial crisis and CDA’s expectation in the prevailing circumstances seems to be unrealistic.

Meanwhile, a number of uplift projects proposed by CDA are likely to be shelved due to financial crunch the authority is presently facing.

It is expected that a number of new projects initiated by the authority cannot be executed in the near future.