Evaluate Your Apartment Before

By: Haval Sami, PhDc, 2005

Construction development in any country is one of the most prominent features of that country's development. After 2005, an important period of prosperity began in the Kurdi-stan Region. During that period, residential developments played an important role in the area. In particular, the previously resi-dential apartments that was not preferable according to normal houses quickly dominated the market. Like any other country in the world, this had some shortcomings and negative as-pects. Before we go into the pros and cons of residential apartments, let's take a look at the reasons why it has its nega-tive sides.
Some reasons for negative as-pects of apartments:
1. Lack of social awareness and people's experience with apartments, so some buyers could not distinguish be-tween high quality and low quality apartments, make the right choices, and cause the right competition among investors.
2. Local engineers lack experi-ence in supervising the qual-ity of units, especially civil engineers, when supervising projects.
3. Lack of experience in manag-ing and monitoring residen-tial projects, especially urban planning, infrastructure and service plans for residential communities.
4. Lack of investors' experience and relying only on the sales side and only consulting real estate agencies.
5. Real estate agencies' role and dominance over other aspects such as engineering, social and even urban planning.
These points briefly highlight the negative sides of apartments in the region. Let's now take a look at the points that are important for evaluating a residential unit.
For a proper architectural and engineering assessment of the quality of a residential unit, there are three important aspects to consider:
First: is the project's urban planning and location is proper, which includes several aspects:
1. Location of the project: is the project in an important and desirable city location?
2. Structure of the project: the project consists of several buildings, the height of the buildings, and what is the dis-tance between two neighbour buildings, in which it should be half the height, that is
1. (distance between two build-ings = 1⁄2 height of buildings). The amount of greenery that each individual needs are 1.5 m2. Parking space for 3+1 apartments with at least 2 cars and 1 car for smaller apartments within 10% of the total number of cars for guests.
3. Availability of project ser-vices: such as schools, mar-kets, mosques, health centers etc..
Second: to what extent the apartment plan is suitable for the family's needs and the culture and lifestyle. The ratio of the service area to the apartment area (the ratio of net area to gross should not exceed 15% to 20%) is the area of the apartment to the sales area. In some projects in Erbil, this reaches 35%, which means that 35% of the area you have purchased has been used as a ser-vice.
Third: the quality of the materi-als used, the method, and the cor-rect place of use. Especially ther-mal and sound insulation are very important for the internal com-fort in the Kurdistan environ-ment. the area of the balconies should not exceed a certain amount. Some projects have 35m2 balconies, and some have mixed balconies with neighbours.
These points are very important to consider when purchasing or renting an apartment. But more importantly, rely on the experi-ence of an architectural engineer to evaluate each apartment to ensure the quality of the building in various aspects.