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Stalled construction sites, broken contracts and buyers unable to recover their money have pushed Uzbekistan’s off-plan housing market back into the spotlight — and the National Committee for Urbanisation and Sustainable Housing Market Development is pressing parliament to move faster on a legal remedy.
The committee has publicly backed a bill currently before the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis titled On Shared-Participation Construction of Multi-Apartment Buildings and Other Real-Estate Objects, which would introduce mandatory escrow accounts for all off-plan residential sales. Under the proposed mechanism, payments made by buyers would be held in dedicated bank accounts and released to the construction company only once conditions specified in law have been met — a structure designed to cut off the misuse of buyer funds and reduce the risk of outright fraud.
What the Bill Would Change
The committee framed the problem in stark terms: citizens who have paid for flats must not be left without either the promised apartment or a refund of their money. Recent weeks have seen public debate over several construction companies that missed handover deadlines, failed to return payments and, in some cases, had criminal proceedings opened against their directors — a pattern the committee cited as the direct impetus for accelerating the escrow proposal.
Beyond protecting deposits, the draft law envisions escrow as a tool for keeping construction moving if a developer runs into serious difficulty. The bill would allow a replacement construction company to be brought in quickly to complete a stalled project, rather than leaving buyers in legal limbo while insolvency proceedings drag on.
The committee described reliable protection of buyer funds, contractual discipline by developers, and transparent competition in the housing market as the foundational conditions the sector currently lacks.
Effectiveness Will Depend on the Detail
The committee acknowledged that the system’s real-world impact will hinge on how the legislation is drafted: specifically, the conditions under which funds are blocked and then released to developers, and the guarantees written in for buyers if a project encounters problems. Those details remain subject to parliamentary deliberation, and the committee stopped short of claiming the bill in its current form fully resolves those questions.
What the committee was unambiguous about is timing: it characterised the earliest possible introduction of escrow accounts as a necessary step to prevent further crises in the under-construction housing market and to restore public confidence in off-plan purchases.