New | Land-rush revolution: US-Cuba talks shake up island’s real estate market

When the communist island began allowing citizens to buy and sell their homes almost four years ago, it was a godsend for Nieves Puig Macias.

The 56-year-old retired architect is suffering from an array of health problems — from bad kidneys to a bum arm — that make it hard for her to get around her three-story home. She’s been hoping to sell it and move into a ground-level dwelling.

But two years later, she says she has a new problem: greedy real estate agents who are so keen on turning a profit that her house has languished, overpriced, on the market.

In just a few short years, Cuba’s non-existent real estate sector has boomed into a multifaceted, sometimes frenetic industry: Hand-scrawled “Se Vende” signs hang off dilapidated colonial structures and modern condos, there are real estate magazines and agents, and almost a dozen homebuying websites have sprung up despite the island’s extremely limited internet access.

Puig says her five-bedroom, five-bathroom home would sell for US$55,000. But agents keep trying to slap an additional US$5,000 to US$10,000 onto the price tag.

“There are people who are interested in buying it, but the intermediaries want to earn too much money,” she said. “And it makes me so angry — I won’t let them.”

If the rebirth of Cuba’s real estate industry has brought with it free-market woes, those issues are likely to get worse in coming years.