The fate of real estate developments depends on what the land authority decides next.

Real estate developers in the city have been told to stop construction for an unspecified time until the investigative team of the Addis Abeba City Administration Land Allocation Authority presents its report on the validity of their title deeds and verifies that they have adhered to the lease agreement, the authority told them.

"The order aims to separate developers who are constructing without valid title deeds, whose construction period has lapsed, and who are constructing on plots that do not belong to them," Kassim Gite, manager of the Land Administration and Construction Permit Authority, told Fortune.

Everybody who is undertaking construction with invalidated title deeds and has started construction late could lose their plots, according to Kassim. "If the land is going to be reclaimed it will be better if they stop construction early so that they do not lose a lot," he said.

Previously, the city had reclaimed one million square metres of land belonging to 34 real estate developers in the Bole, Yeka, Nifas Silk Lafto, and Kolfe Keranio districts in a letter it had sent to these district offices on July 29, 2010. The new move to stop construction applies to all real estate developers in the city, sources close to the city administration said. However, the authority refuted this. It only applies to those delinquent ones, Kassim said.

"Developers who have been working, following the procedures, and meeting the lease agreements have not received such an order," Kassim told Fortune. The order has taken the recipients by surprise, just like the reclaiming of the 34 developers' plots had shocked them.

The rationale behind the authority's move to stop construction is unclear and disappointing because the investigation could have been done while construction was going on, said one of the developers, who requested anonymity. Over the past weeks, different teams from the authority have visited the various construction sites, according to eyewitnesses on some of the sites.

One team looked at the progress of the construction, another verified the plots where construction is taking place against the developers' title deeds, one more team cross checked what the previous ones had done, and a fourth double checked everything and took pictures.

After the teams' visits, which started on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, many of the construction sites received the order to stop work. Out of the 20 sites currently under development in the Gerji area, 18 have been ordered to stop construction. The authority has stopped the construction of some real estate developers, it admitted, but was unwilling to comment on their number.

After it had written the letter to the 34 developers, the Land Administration and Construction Permit Authority, which is unhappy about the stage of development on the plots which it has given to developers, mostly in the 2005/06 fiscal year, has taken back 60ht of land from developers around the city.

Many of the developers blame the city administration for the delay in construction and have written a letter protesting its decision. They claim that the city failed to deliver their land on time and did not provide the necessary infrastructure, like roads and electricity to enable them to start construction.

However, the city administration seems set on rectifying the findings via a task force that was established last year and which conducted a study in seven districts, finding a dismal performance of around 14pc among the 125 real estate developers who have taken around 550ht of land.