Buying — 5 min —
The compound is the unit
In much of the country the thing being bought is not a house. Plans that miss this sit unsold.
Developers working in Khost, Paktia and much of the south keep building single detached villas and keep struggling to sell them, while compounds — several buildings inside one wall — move quickly at comparable money.
The reason is that the household being housed is not a nuclear one. It is a family that expects to add a married son's household to the same plot within a decade, and a single villa has nowhere to put him.
A compound is not a lesser building type. It is an incremental one: a wall, a court, and one range built now with the foundations for a second. It is also, incidentally, far better thermally than the villa, for the same reason a courtyard is.
Buyers know this. It is mostly the people drawing the plans who do not.
