It's never easy to buy or sell a home -- even in the best market conditions, said Peter Lane Taylor, a contributor to Forbes, in an article on Sunday. And in the current purgatory climate, it's become nearly impossible.

The scenario is true for almost every country that has been hit by the novel coronavirus and Bangladesh is no exception.

The country's real estate sector, which has been witnessing sluggish sales for a few years for many challenges, is likely to face further difficulty as the demand for housing would drop because of unprecedented economic uncertainty brought on by the pandemic.

The demand for flats will decline this year after showing some improvement last year, realtors say.

"It is down to the psychology of clients -- they don't want to spend money for property during any difficult time," said Alamgir Shamsul Alamin, president of the Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh (REHAB).

Because of the lockdown, around 6,000 projects of the REHAB members are in limbo as construction workers and other employees have returned home.

The activities of all 120 members of the industry lobby group screeched to a halt on March 25, when the government put in place a countrywide lockdown to curb coronavirus transmissions.

"We are not thinking about business at the moment -- rather, we are trying to tackle the crisis."

The latest crisis for the real estate sector came at a time when it had been on course to recovery from a long slowdown. 

The sector received a shot in the arm in July last year when the government cut the registration cost and the bank interest also came down. 

And in less than six months came the coronavirus rampage, which has so far infected about 2 million people in 210 countries and territories around the world and claimed more than 128,000 lives.

Its deadly nature has prompted governments around their world to put large swaths of their national economies in an induced coma, all in the hope that they would be able to press pause on the economy, save lives and then press play again.

"The real estate is one such sector that can't run without political, social and economic stability," Alamin added.

Banks and non-banking financial institutions would be directly affected by the ongoing crisis as people have either cancelled their plans to borrow money or put the plan on hold -- a potentially devastating change in consumer behaviour.

The market is dull as renowned realtors that provide clients to IPDC Finance are not getting bookings at this moment, said Md Sirajus Saleken, head of mortgage of the non-bank financial institution and a major home loan provider.

The NBFI depends on a dozen of reputed realtors for home loan borrowers.

"If realtors can't get buyers, lenders will not get any prospective home loan borrowers," Saleken said, adding that he doesn't think the situation would improve any time soon.

It would take a long time before their confidence is restored, said an executive of another NBFI requesting anonymity.

The sector though was off to a good start in 2020, said Mahzabin Chowdhury, head of marketing at bproperty.com, the biggest online real estate broker in Bangladesh.

But from March, soon after the announcement of the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Bangladesh, the demand for flats nosedived, said a senior official of Sheltech, one of the leading realtors in Bangladesh.

"We don't see any immediate recovery of the sector," he added.

If the situation improves globally within the next one and a half months, the sector would post a comeback in the last quarter of 2020, Chowdhury said.

The reason being, the coronavirus pandemic is having an outsize impact on the economies of the EU and North America and a good portion of the non-resident Bangladeshis living there are solid clients of Bangladesh's real estate sector.

"Otherwise, the sector would fall into deep uncertainty," she added.

The pandemic would have a chain effect on the whole real estate sector, Alamin said.

"Customers may not get delivery of projects on time. Banks may not get back their loans on time. Realtors will have problems with landlords," he added.

The industry's allied sectors, of which there are 230 of them, have also fallen into trouble as the coronavirus compelled the country to go for a complete shutdown, according to sector people.