Pakistan's houses are built to be resold, not to be lived in

From sports head to banker to real estate CEO

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Wahaaj Nauman Qureshi as a high-school friend — one year his senior at Beaconhouse in Islamabad — whose trajectory into real estate was, in Muzamil’s words, one of the last things he would have predicted. The warmth is genuine, but the conversation moves quickly past nostalgia into substance.

Wahaaj’s early life is a study in restless experimentation. After completing his ACCA qualification, he joined Bank Alfalah in 2014 in a field sales role — a jarring shift for someone from a desk-job-oriented accounting background. “I remember my branch managers forcing me to go out of the office at 09:00, 09:30AM and coming back at 05:00,” he recalls. “I used to go door to door, different offices.” From there he moved into relationship management, then investment banking, spending five years in total before resigning in 2019.

But the banking story is only part of the picture. Before and alongside it, Wahaaj had already run two other ventures: an event management business he started during his A-level gap period — seeded, amusingly, by money he saved negotiating sports kit prices for his school — and a restaurant with his wife that built a loyal following around “crazy shakes” before being put on hold when their daughter was born. A tuition centre partnership, wound down after the APS Peshawar attack made him unwilling to risk students’ safety, rounds out a portrait of someone who has been testing business models since his teens.

Why a banker walked into real estate

Wahaaj’s exit from banking was not impulsive. Three forces converged. First, his banking clients in Islamabad’s Blue Area and F-10 were overwhelmingly real estate people, and watching them, he concluded the industry was “outdated and a lot can be done.” Second, a childhood friend whose family business was real estate had been pushing him for years. Third — and he raises this carefully — daily exposure to 500 to 600 clients from different backgrounds had planted a persistent discomfort with interest-based banking in his mind as a Muslim.

The trigger was a seminar. A real estate developer invited Wahaaj to gather his network for a product pitch. He spent a month preparing his guest list, making calls, motivating people to attend. “Alhamdulillah we had record sales on that event,” he says. That result, combined with the three pressures above, was enough. He resigned with three or four senior banking offers on the table. His family did not speak to him for a month. Someone in the extended family reportedly said that “girls aren’t given in marriage to real estate people.” He took the leap anyway, starting from a 400-to-500-square-foot office.

How the industry actually works — and who gets paid

Muzamil asks Wahaaj to walk through the mechanics of a typical project launch: developer acquires land, markets it, sells through agents, collects money. Who are the stakeholders, and how does the money flow?

Wahaaj identifies three that matter: the developer, the dealer, and the end user. Government is nominally a fourth, but he dismisses it quickly — “unfortunately mostly absent.” The problem, he argues, is structural: “Market mein kya hua — bahut kam aise log the jinhon ne end users par focus kiya. Saari end user se paisa nikla, woh dealer ke through developer ke paas gaya aur developer se wapas dealer ke paas share aa gaya. Jo investments thi woh dump ho gayi end user ki.”

The root cause is what he calls uninformed decision-making. Dealers tell clients “sir ji faltu paise pade hain, chaka lag jaega” — your idle money will double — without ever discussing profitability indices, NPVs, or ROIs. Nobody forecasts. Nobody explains what they are actually buying. The customer parks money in a project that may never deliver, while the developer and dealer have already extracted their margins.

The COVID boom and what it revealed

The 2020 amnesty scheme — which allowed unlimited investment in real estate without source-of-funds scrutiny — coincided with a population that had been locked down for months, burning through savings, and desperate to do something with their money. When markets reopened in July 2020, the combination produced a boom that Wahaaj says ran until April 2022. “It was boom of real estate aur itna bada boom tha jiske andar a lot of people made a lot of money.”

But the boom also exposed the industry’s worst habits at scale. Wahaaj describes a developer in Gujar Khan — a town of fewer than 100,000 people — who signed up 600-plus franchise dealers across the country, collected over 120 billion rupees, and sold more plots than the town’s entire population. The mechanism was simple: each franchise ran its own advertising, each brought in ten or more buyers, and the network effect did the rest. “Gujar Khan yahan se kitne logon ne uthkar Gujar Khan jaana tha?” he asks. Nobody was buying to live there. The money was purely speculative, and the developer collected it all.

The regulatory vacuum at the centre of everything

Muzamil presses on the structural question: why does this keep happening? Wahaaj’s answer is unambiguous — there is no real estate regulatory authority in Pakistan equivalent to what exists in other countries. No licensing, no mandatory feasibility studies submitted to government, no requirement for developers to pledge funds against project delivery the way banks must pledge capital with the State Bank.

“Jis tarah koi bhi bank kholta hai na — mein koi bhi x y z banda ya mein ya aap amoot ke bank nahin khol sakte, uske liye you have to pledge a huge amount of money with the state bank. In case the bank defaults, state bank is liable to pay all the creditors. Isi tarah developers ke saath bhi hona chahiye.” The logic is clean: if a developer had to pledge 70 to 80 percent of a project’s equivalent value with the government before advertising, most of the fly-by-night operators would be filtered out automatically.

The second regulatory gap is advertising. Only approved projects should be allowed to market themselves. Right now, a developer with a tiny sliver of land and no acquisition can run a national campaign, collect billions, and disappear. Wahaaj points to international markets where multiple government departments must approve any real estate marketing activity before it runs — precisely because attractive advertising is the primary vector through which uninformed buyers are captured.

Ghost cities, vanity projects, and the missing middle

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises what he calls the deeper dysfunction: Pakistan is not building housing for people to live in. It is building housing as a store of value for people who already own homes. “We are selling vanity projects,” he says. Wahaaj agrees without hesitation.

The evidence is visible across Islamabad: buildings completed and sitting empty, societies on the airport’s outskirts with no residents, luxury apartments priced at 40,000 rupees per square foot in Blue Area that no salaried household can afford. A three-crore-rupee investor buys a unit, leaves it vacant, and refuses to rent it at 30,000 rupees a month because the yield is negligible and tenants cause wear. The property never reaches the person it was nominally designed for.

Wahaaj traces this to the way the value chain is structured. By the time land passes from original developer to commercial buyer to apartment developer to end user, the premium has been extracted at every handoff. “Already aapne jo premium hai na woh bahut saare stakeholders mein divide karti hai.” The end user, arriving last, pays the fully loaded price — which in current market conditions often makes no financial sense even as an investment, let alone as a home.

Banking finance as a self-regulation mechanism

Muzamil argues that the financing model is itself broken: individuals, not banks, are funding real estate development, and unregulated individuals will use every means available — “lawful, unlawful means, false hopes, fake commitments, miss-selling” — to get their share. Wahaaj builds on this. When a bank finances a project, the bank conducts due diligence, identifies which plots it will mortgage, and becomes a stakeholder with skin in the game. That process alone filters out bad projects.

The reason developers avoid banks is not just the cost of financing — it is that they do not need to. Individual investors are willing to hand over money on the basis of a marketing event and a payment plan. “Developer ko pata hai ke mujhe bank ki taraf jaane ki zaroorat hi nahin hai. Mere paas woh champ jo hai woh khud se apne paise lagaane ke liye ready hai.” If dealers were properly regulated — licensed, audited, held to competency standards — the easy route would become harder, and the banking route would become relatively more attractive, bringing institutional due diligence back into the chain.

Second-tier cities and the only realistic path to affordable housing

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the direct question: what does affordable housing actually require? Wahaaj’s answer is structural rather than policy-based. City-centre land in Islamabad is simply too expensive. Construction materials have tripled. A developer who sold apartments at 8,000 to 9,000 rupees per square foot when steel was 70,000 rupees per ton cannot deliver at the same price when steel is above 200,000 rupees per ton. The math does not work, and that is why projects stall.

The only lever that can be controlled is land cost, which means moving to suburbs and second-tier cities. Wahaaj points to the Rawat and Sangjani corridor as an example of how infrastructure — signal-free roads, accessibility — can make previously remote areas viable for daily commuting. As that infrastructure extends, second-tier cities become genuine alternatives. Payment plans of three to four years align with the time it takes for those areas to develop enough amenities to be liveable.

He also endorses the model of developers who sell finished apartments rather than plots — citing one example of a developer doing exactly that on the Peshawar Motorway — but notes that this model only works on a level playing field. If an unregulated competitor can undercut on price by collecting money with no pledged funds and no construction obligation, the responsible developer cannot compete commercially. “Agar level playing field lo, har developer ko kaha jae ke aapne apni development ka 30%, 40% jo hai foot developer develop karke end user ko dena” — that single requirement would transform the incentive structure.

Pakistan in 2050: a cautious optimism

Muzamil closes by asking Wahaaj how he sees Pakistan evolving over the next 28 years, given everything he has observed across banking and real estate. Wahaaj’s answer is measured but genuinely optimistic. He points to strategic location, access to warm waters, and — most concretely — a young population that is “standing up for their rights” and demanding a different kind of country. Freelancing, digitalization, and entrepreneurship are creating income pathways that did not exist a decade ago. “Fiber ka concept hi nahin tha. Freelancing ka concept hi nahin tha.”

On his own industry, he is clear that government-level regulation is unlikely in the near term — the people with power to regulate are also the people who benefit most from the current opacity. “Unfortunately agar regulation aa jaegi tab toh kisi ko favor nahin chahiye.” But he describes what his own firm is doing in the meantime: working only with developers whose due diligence is complete, building escrow relationships with banks to protect end-user funds, and refusing to market projects where they cannot stand behind the investment. “Hum apne customer ko kehte hain ke we’ll secure your right.”

It is a firm-level answer to a systemic problem — and Wahaaj knows it. But it is also, he suggests, how industries begin to change when the policymakers won’t.