If there is one sector of the economy that is truly booming in Nepal today, it is the housing industry.
Construction can't keep up with demand fuelled by remittance and urbanisation. Needless to say, most of this growth is haphazard and malignant.
Yet, there was one group of engineers and investors who felt there was a need for a paradigm shift: provide quality housing at affordable prices while at the same time steer city's living spaces towards planned growth and create jobs. Om Rajbhandhary and his friends got together in 2001 to start Comfort Housing with this vision and launched a 76-unit development in Sitapaila.
"A developer is a contractor, consultant and client all rolled into one," replies Rajbhandhary when asked to describe his job. As the CEO of Comfort Housing, he has to deal with everyone. The biggest challenge was to overcome the Nepali tradition of building one's own house.
"We don't want to live in a house made by others because we don't trust builders," says Rajbhandhary. But Comfort has managed to build trust. People took well to the idea of living together because it reminded them of their ancestral bahals and choks in the old city. And because of the hassles of finding cement, steel rods, getting the water and electricity supply, builders realised it was much more convenient to let someone else worry about all that.
After Sitapaila, Rajbhandhary launched the even more ambitious Comfort Housing estates in Budhanilkantha, Sitapaila and Dharan. Rajbhandhary says he'd be challenged by developing more housing areas outside Kathmandu to ease the pressure on the capital, but most clients want to buy in Kathmandu.
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