Staff Shortage Hinders Work at Daraa Cadastral Affairs Directorate

The Directorate of Cadastral Affairs in the city of Daraa is experiencing a staff shortage due to the de facto resignations caused by low wages and the retirement of some employees. This has led to a backlog of unprocessed real estate transactions and delays in documenting and registering property incidents.

Two sub-departments for real estate documentation in the cities of Izraa and Sanamein, along with four real estate documentation offices in the rural areas of the governorate, are affiliated with the main directorate in the Daraa Al-Mahatta neighbourhood. Operations were partially halted during opposition control over Daraa between 2012-2018 but resumed after regime forces regained control of the governorate under the so-called reconciliation agreement in mid-2018. None of these offices or branches were damaged during the years of armed conflict.

However, the shortage of technical staff across the various departments of the directorate is now hindering many people’s desires to complete their real estate transactions that accumulated during the years of war, Basil Al-Jayoush, the director of the Daraa Directorate of Cadastral Affairs, told the official Al-Baath newspaper on November 14, 2023.

Mr Jayoush stated that the directorate currently operates with no more than 20 technical staff, including four engineers, to provide all real estate services to individuals and government entities. The director added that the directorate’s work is “on the edge of a cliff” following the retirement of the last employees of the Surveying Department at the end of 2023. The Surveying Department is essential to the directorate’s operations, requiring significant expertise and the ability to use specialised equipment for measuring land areas.

The Surveying Department provides essential surveying services, including area statement service, boundary statement service, property ownership statement for beautification and common ownership termination, supplying public entities with triangulation point coordinates, subdivision transactions, plot consolidation transactions, property unification transactions, subdivision plan transactions, and expropriation execution.

Mr Jayoush confirmed that the staff shortage in the Surveying Department has slowed down the completion of real estate transactions, calling for the replenishment of the department with new employees through recruitment calls.

A former directorate employee in Daraa told The Syria Report that the total number of staff across all departments decreased from about 33 to 20 during 2023. He explained that the Surveying Department alone lost five employees, i.e. all of its staff, in the last six months of 2023. Two of them reportedly resigned (because state institutions rarely accept resignation requests from their employees, resignations practically take the form of employees simply stopping coming to work) due to insufficient salary to cover transportation costs. Meanwhile, three were retired upon reaching the legal retirement age.

The former employee stated that the main problem is not with the recruitment calls but with the lack of incentives to apply for the jobs in the first place. Many experienced surveyors prefer to work independently as freelance surveyors without being tied to an official position.

A local correspondent for The Syria Report said there is no agreed-upon fixed pricing for the work of freelance surveyors. The fee is negotiated between the surveyor and the employer, based on factors such as the number of points that need to be marked to define boundaries, the size of the property, and the surveyor’s experience. Generally, a freelance surveyor charges a starting fee of SYP 300,000 to delineate the boundaries of a single property, which exceeds the monthly salary of an employee in the department. Freelance surveyors must have their own theodolite, a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes.

However, the duties of an official employee in the surveying department at the Cadastral Affairs directorate go far beyond those that a freelance surveyor can perform. For example, an official’s tasks include writing report minutes on disputes over the boundaries and areas of properties. In contrast, a freelance surveyor is not authorised to perform this task. Disputes over property boundaries have become common recently, with many property sales not officially registered with the Cadastral Affairs directorate. This leads to conflicts between sellers, buyers, and neighbours over the boundaries of the sold properties.

Another source explained that a second problem hindering recruitment in the surveying department of the Daraa directorate is the internal regulations that limit hiring in the surveying department to graduates of the Technical Engineering Institute (Intermediate Engineering Institute) affiliated with the Ministry of Higher Education. There is no branch of this institute in Daraa; instead, it is associated with the Civil Engineering Faculty at Damascus University. Since the 2011 uprising, there has been a significant decline in the number of students from Daraa studying at this institute due to harassment and arbitrary arrests of people from Daraa at security and military checkpoints. This has resulted in a shortage of recent graduates from the institute.