Boa Vista lends to the success of the Minha Casa Minha Vida Social Housing Programme

The success of the Minha Casa Minha Vida Social Housing programme has been amazing, and since it's official launch back in the spring of 2009 the programme has gone from strength to strength and is well on track to hit it's 5 million home projection by early 2014. Minha Casa Minha Vida is now rolling out throughout Brazil and the latest city to benefit from the programme is Boa Vista

Boa Vista (Fine View) is a Brazilian city of about a quarter of a million people. It's the capital of the state of Roraima and is located in the far north of the country at 2.8 degrees N Latitude and 60.7 degrees W Longitude. It's only about 130 miles from the border with Venezuela, not far at all in terms of Brazil's huge size. Boa Vista also has the distinction of being the only state capital situated north of the Equator. It is situated a vast 6,000 Km from both Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo and 4,300 Km from Brasilia, the national capital, thus emphasising again the enormous scale of this, the sixth largest country in the world.

Most of the two-way trade involving Boa Vista is with Manaus, the large, Amazon-based capital of the state of Amazonas. Commerce also exists between Boa Vista and the town of Lethem in Guyana, also with Santa Elena in Venezuela. Apart from these three (and some smaller regional towns) that's really the only scope for road communications. Everywhere else in Brazil has to be reached by air. Boa Vista is unusual in that its layout was actually planned originally. It's been set-out radially, in a series of concentric rings, rather than grew up organically like so many other cities. The architect Darsi Derenusson drew up the city's plans, based on those of Paris and Boa Vista was formally founded in the year 1890 as 'Boa Vista do Rio Branco', referring to the river on which the city stands. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Dutch, Spanish and British empires had their eye on the area later to become Boa Vista and Roraima, but since then the region has been firmly Portuguese. The wider state of Roraima only has fifteen municipalities in its entire area. The capital, Boa Vista has more than fifty percent of a total population of 470,000.. According to FUNAI, the federal agency, more than thirty thousand of these are indigenous people ('Indians') of the Amazon River and area. The state is the most northern and also the least populated in the whole of Brazil, having only become a fully-fledged state in the year 1988. Previously it had been a federal territory since the middle of the twentieth century.

Nowadays the state has an economy worth about 3.6 Billion Reais per year. This is overwhelmingly based on the service sector with industry and agriculture scarcely exceeding ten per cent between them. On average the GDP per person of the city and surrounding areas is only around nine thousand Reais per capita.The climate of the area is generally described as tropical savannah and it is of course heavily influenced by the mighty Amazon which dominates the ecology of northern Brazil. This means that the general weather patterns are hot and rainy from May to August then very warm and dry from September to April. Average temperatures vary remarkably little between the two and indeed across the whole twelve months of the year.

Minha Casa Minha Vida hasn't just been a useful tool for reducing the housing deficit in the country, the programme has been instrumental in the runaway success of the booming Brazilian economy thanks to the foreign investment that the programme has bought thanks to international property developers such as the award winning EcoHouse Group who choose to build Minha Casa Minha Vida homes with investors funds rather than finance from the banks, this has seen the company build 1000's more Minha Casa Minha Vida homes than other developer involved in the programme.

EcoHouse Group Looking Forward to a Very Successful Year

So far, 2013 is proving to be a landmark year for EcoHouse Group and there's still three quarters of it to go! To begin with, a crucially important general achievement was the Company being awarded the ISO 9001 quality management certification. The prominence of this world-class accreditation can't be exaggerated. It is, after all the globe's most widely recognised and respected certification of company performance, demonstrating stellar levels of efficiency, quality of service and investor satisfaction.

EcoHouse CEO Anthony Armstrong Emery commented;" ISO 9001 is the most widely recognised quality management standard in the world. It demonstrates our commitment in meeting the needs of investors, property purchasers and agents and enables us to continue to achieve consistent excellence in performance and service". Throughout the world well over one million organisations are independently certified for the award. This makes ISO 9001 one of the most widely regarded benchmarks for commerce and industry, helping holders to attract and retain business at much higher levels. EcoHouse is an international operation. Most of its 'end-product' is of course in Brazil but increasingly, administration and investment centres elsewhere are growing in importance. They are strategically located and developing in Canada, Britain, the Gulf and, increasingly, Singapore. For example, SMART Expo, Asia's longest-established Property development showcase held their thirtieth continental exhibition at the Sands Centre in Singapore recently. The two day event was addressed by EcoHouse's North American Chief, Deen Bissessar who massively impressed the assembly with the company's investment products. He explained in detail the benefits of planning ahead when investing in property and outlined the excellent opportunities with Brazil social housing. Mr. Bissessar concluded by remarking "The EcoHouse social housing product is currently so in demand that most of our units are pre-sold to end Brazilian buyers before we even allocate an investor to finance the construction of their unit". Also in the south-east Asian metropolis, EcoHouse held three separate presentations in Singapore at the beginning of February. These were mainly for existing EcoHouse investors and more that 550 of them attended the meetings at the Company's prestigious new headquarters on Temasek Boulevard.

The presentations were introduced by Andrew Batt, International Editor of the celebrated Singapore 'Property Guru' website. EcoHouse senior executives were also present to explain about the Company's recent exciting new developments in Brazil. A great start to the Chinese New Year! The following month, on 2nd March Ecohouse founder and CEO Anthony Armstrong Emery addressed 400 people at the ST Property Forum in Singapore. EcoHouse was the main sponsor for the event. Mr. Emery spoke to the gathering about Property Investment Strategy for the 'Year of the Snake' .He was also accompanied by his International Commercial Director, Jason Purvor. Another exciting innovation for EcoHouse clients only applies at present to Singapore investors but may well be expanded later to include others. It's that investors who leave their money with EcoHouse for three years (rather than just one) can now get paid back up to eleven months early;.

It's a win-win situation! The extra investment helps EcoHouse further accelerate planned construction of 40,000 homes over the next five years and is also ideal for investors who are able to leave their capital outlay with us a little longer than the standard one-year.In return, three-year investors will receive their 20% return now, as well as receiving 20% a year for the next three years.