The Minister of Construction and Physical Planning, Branko Bacic, has announced a national plan for housing policy with a series of measures aimed at making housing cheaper and rents more affordable.

“We will be presenting this strategy soon. It includes measures to achieve three goals: affordable housing, sustainable housing and a liveable environment,” Bacic said during question time in the national parliament.

Legislation on the management and maintenance of buildings

One of the measures to achieve these goals is property taxation, Bacic said, explaining that he could not agree with this collocation.

“Perhaps it would be better to call it taxation of non-residential property. Our intention is to bring almost 40% of residential units, i.e. 958,000 units, to the market through taxation,” said the minister.

Another measure is the adoption of laws on the management and maintenance of buildings to make it more difficult for owners to offer short-term rentals in the tourism industry, he added.

We will allow young families to recover the amount they have paid for the purchase of property and we will redefine the housing subsidy, the minister said.

Plenkovic: The aim is to bring as many affordable homes onto the market as possible

All of this should be part of the demographic measures, he said.

After the question and answer session, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told the press that the aim was to bring as much affordable housing onto the market as possible.

He said that a draft for property taxation had been prepared and that the plan would be presented next week.

He dismissed speculation that this tax reform had been watered down due to pressure from the banks or the church.