HOW LONG YOUNG PAKISTANIS MUST WORK TO BUY A HOUSE

A white-collared, fresh graduate of any field needs to work for approximately 20 years at the average salary of his/her occupation to buy a one Kanal/500-square-yard house in Defence Housing Authority (DHA)--the most posh locality of Pakistan.

This data was revealed in the latest research of Pakistan’s best real estate website, Lamudi.pk. The portal analyzed house prices in its extensive database, which has around 130,000 active property listings. They also analyzed the average salaries of Pakistanis working in various fields using data from Payscale.com.

Payscale.com details the average salaries of numerous occupations according to the length of professional experience and other factors. For instance, the average annual salary of a General Practice Doctor was reported to be $20,149, the salary of a marketing professional, $23,072 and so on.

The number of years of work needed to afford a one Kanal/500-square-yard house in DHA was calculated by dividing the average price by the average yearly salary of young Pakistanis.

Saad Arshed, Country Director of Lamudi Pakistan, commented: “The data conforms to the norms and traditions of our society where people prefer to live with their families and move out once they have the means to do so.

An average of 20 years of work experience in any field corresponds to people investing in properties around 30-40 years of age, a demographic which forms a significant portion of our traffic. Additionally, 78 percent of this age group prefer to buy over rent, which corroborates this data as well.”

According to Lamudi, the data does not represent all employees across all industries, but just aims to give the fresh graduates a broad picture of the average number of years they need to work before they can invest in a house in a high end area.