Real estate cartels

With incapable overseers in action, Pakistan’s real estate industry stays in the hands of cartels whose executors — land acquisition experts, development companies, real estate consultants and construction groups — manifest a unity that manipulates property prices and controls the market to fill their pockets. Let me start with how the world responds to the real estate cartels. On 15th December 2022, the Finnish Market Court fined the Finnish Real Estate Management Federation and six prominent companies for their clandestine involvement in the fixation of prices and exchange of commercially sensitive information. In April 2021, the US District Court seized the properties owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, the Mexican cartel leader. The US government then sought international cooperation to call the culprit on the carpet. Similarly, the German Federal Supreme Court penalised Booking.com for practising cartel conduct in rental properties.