Malawi Housing Corporation (MHC) has shocked its tenants by hiking its house rentals by 10 percent with effect from the 1st of August.
Director of Administration and Corporate Services at MHC Wellington Kazembe told the local media that the institution has been forced to hike the rentals due to rising cost of materials for maintenance.
“Although we have raised the rentals, we are still making losses because the cost of materials for maintenance is higher as compared to what the cooperation is receiving from its tenants,” Kazembe argued.
However, MHC tenants have questioned the raise of the rentals arguing the houses are not being properly maintained to demand such a raise.
“The problem is that they area not well maintaining the houses so we end up doing maintenance works like painting or things to do with plumbing using money from our pockets which becomes costly. If they were taking good care of the houses we could not have been complaining,” complained some tenants.
While appreciating that MHC are relatively reasonable in terms of rentals, another tenant argued that the corporation should try and build new houses and phase out the older ones so that all people not politicians can purchase them and renovate them for themselves.
However, Kazembe pleaded with their tenants to understand them, arguing ”Like any other sector the housing corporation is feeling the impact of the rising cost of living which the countries currently facing and that our tenants should try to reason with the corperation.”