Joy Douglas, general manager of the Urban Development Corporation. - File
With tens of hundreds of acres to play with, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) has a master plan for the Caymanas Estate that now is being seen as a natural expansion of the congested capital just three minute to five away.
The investment to be made is as much as US$3 billion - that's the equivalent of J$267 billion - the UDC said this week.
The plan includes a new industrial estate of about 1,000 acres, sporting facilities, as well as some 4,000 new homes in a 400-acre development to be called 'Caymanas Village'.
The projects will be rolled out over a seven or eight-year period, said UDC general manager Joy Douglas, in a Financial Gleaner interview this week.
But the UDC is starting fairly small, with 200 homes at the 'Village' which will be marketed to the low-end real estate market.
"This is going to be a complete community, an enviable one in which to live," she said.
"So we are now phasing it and we will be starting in the Village, which is over 400 acres," she said.
The Caymanas Estate located in St Catherine is known most famously as home to horse racing in Jamaica, but other lands that were once dominated by sugar cane are now to take on new economic activity.
The UDC general manager said this would be one of the largest projects ever to be rolled out in Jamaica, with different elements spanning residential real estate, industrial/commericial develop-ments and sporting facilities.
Caymanas is already home to the Caymans Race Track, Kingston Polo Club, Caymanas Golf Club, which the UDC owns; and its open spaces are used as a venue for motorbike racing.
"We have a mega sports facility that we are going to try to develop to reinforce the fact that Caymanas is going to be the major regional recreational node for the Kingston Metropolitan region," Douglas said.
"We are going to be establishing this mega sports facility to provide the kind of training facilities that all sectors of the society in the KMR require."
That facility will be marketed at institutions like University of Technology which, since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has got international recognition for producing world record athletes.
The UDC boss also said the Jamaica Defence Force will besetting up a training facility on the property.
Douglas was primed on the ambitious project being rolled out on her watch, but acknowledged that its financing would be just as massive an undertaking.
"Caymanas is a US$3 billion project and the UDC certainly does not have that in its treasury. So this project will have to be imple-mented through joint venture arrangements and other financial arrangements and we are seeking to put that in place," she said.
Disclosures to Parliament by the Ministry of Finance in April said the UDC would be going after special funding of J$2.1 billion this fiscal year, which would include J$1.17 billion for the Caymanas Development-Village Project.
Douglas said the sort of funding model to be pursued for the full cost was still being developed.
"It really is going to be a major matter of raising the capital, bringing in some good joint venture partners, possible divesting elements of it for private developers to go ahead - all that is being examined," she said.
The UDC will also be working in conjunction with the Ministry of Investment, Industry and Commerce to develop an enterprise zone on the northern section of the Caymanas lands that minister of investment, industry and commerce Karl Samuda said last year should be developed within the three to five years and create 10,000 jobs.
Subdivision plans
Last week, he mentioned the project again during his contribution to the Budget Debate, saying it "entails the build-out of units that will service the ICT industry, the services industry and provide warehousing and light manufacturing, such as agro-processing."
Douglas this week confirmed that the UDC was working along with the ministry to get the project off the ground.
"We will also be working simultaneous on the northern part of the enterprise zone. That is south of Mandela (Highway) but there is a section of it north of Mandela so we are also working with the ministry of industry to begin the subdivision plans that is north of Mandela," she said.
The highway connects Kingston and St Catherine.
The first 200 homes to be built under the project, Douglas said, will go on the market by year end.
The units will be targeted at groups such as teachers, the security forces and the military, and each will be priced below $3.5 million, the maximum that loan applicants can access from state housing and mortgage agency the National Housing Trust (NHT).
"We have started off looking at using the NHT benchmark as our lower end units but we have had to revise that given the fact that many of our target groups - we are reliably informed - cannot necessarily afford (more)," she said.
Mortgage market's loans
The UDC boss was referencing a new market analysis conducted by the NHT, which found that some 80 per cent of its contributors could not afford the $3.5 million mortgage, which is priced at two per cent to eight per cent, depending on income category, and is the cheapest on the market.
The private mortgage market's loans are priced at about 13.75 per cent and higher.
Douglas said the units would be either studios or one-bedroom units, with sufficient room for future expansion.
"We are trying to bring them under $3.5 million so that they can meet the NHT threshold there," she said. "We have to cut the coat to fit the cloth."
The first homes will be rolled out by March 2010.
dionne.rose@gleanerjm.com
Undeveloped lands on the Caymanas Estate in St Catherine are used for mountain bike racing, and a multiplicity of activities.