INTRES Advisory is a key part of the Michigan Consortium for Housing Development (MICH Development) which is a consortium of public and private sector entities working collaboratively to establish conduits for positioning Michigan businesses to seize global construction and development opportunities to pursue a 100,000 unit residential housing development in Iraq.

The initial focus of the coalition is in response to a request for proposals from the National Investment Commission of Iraq (NIC). The proposal calls for the design and development of a planned community that includes 100,000 housing units as well as commercial, civic and institutional components; a “New City” with a population of ~600,000 inhabitants.

In 2010, the NIC sent out a global Request for Proposals for the construction of over 2 million housing units throughout the Republic of Iraq over the next 5 years. In response, the NIC received approximately 135 proposals from around the world. Of the original proposals received, the field was narrowed to 35 proposals for further discussion. 

In the past year, that field has been further narrowed to around 5 developer groups, MICH Development is among the small group of global proposals that are recognized by the NIC as being the most viable for full scale development. The signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the NIC confirmed this status and signalled the successful conclusion of MICH Development’s “Phase One”(PI).

MICH Development will target export opportunities for Michigan companies in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and material supply sectors as well as connect Michigan’s academic, economic development and manufacturing groups to markets abroad. Intres Advisory will focus Eurasia and Turkish Companies as a strong key market.

A “New City” with a potential population of 500,000-600,000 inhabitants and an associated $1.5 billion in export revenue for Michigan companies and $5 billion in export revenue for Eurasia and Turkish Companies based companies. “New City” will be called “town in town, town in Iraq” as a project slogan created by Intres Advisory.

This project aims to provide the context of the housing challenge in Iraq and confer the enabling strategies and operational instruments that need to be put in place to achieve the housing for all vision in general, but specifically this project is analyzing the concept of “Affordable Housing Development in Iraq”. The goal of the project is to improve the quality and the quantity of affordable housing units.

It can be noted here that there are many project designs and proposals that can be implemented but without implementation modalities or even enabling mechanisms for would-be beneficiaries to access them. This project proposal goes beyond design to attempt to propose appropriate mechanisms that can be used to have the beneficiaries access.

The vision of the project proposal is to create an economically easily accessible affordable housing project that will act as a model of sustainable development addressing issues of population’s economic status, environmental quality while meeting needs of the economically fragile group of the community and first house buyers.