Trinidad Launches LandmarkTT Housing Initiative on State Lands Amid Procurement Scrutiny

Kingston, Jamaica — 24 February 2026

Trinidad and Tobago has launched a new state enterprise specifically designed to accelerate housing delivery through public-private partnerships, incorporating LandmarkTT Properties Limited in February 2026 as a special-purpose vehicle to unlock underutilised state lands for residential development. The initiative, approved by Cabinet in November 2025 and incorporated in early 2026, represents a significant shift in how the government intends to address the country’s demand for mid-to-upper-income housing, explicitly operating outside the subsidised HDC model and targeting fully planned residential communities built at no direct public cost to the construction budget.

The LandmarkTT Model

Under the State Land Investment and Development Public-Private Partnership model, the government will make state lands available to private-sector developers, who will be responsible for obtaining their own financing and carrying out construction. Developers will only receive final payment once housing units are sold on the open market. LandmarkTT will retain ownership of the land itself throughout the process, with developers receiving payment for construction services after sales are completed. The government maintains that no public funds will be spent on construction, though independent analysts have raised questions about the extent to which the provision of state land at undisclosed values represents a form of indirect subsidy that should be disclosed in the project accounting.

LandmarkTT’s mandate includes identifying priority development sites, overseeing construction against national standards, structuring profit-sharing arrangements, and managing marketing and sales. Its first major contract, valued at 129.2 million Trinidad and Tobago dollars, was awarded in April 2026 to Mootilal Ramhit and Sons Contracting Limited for design, build, and finance services for the Allamby Residential Development in Corinth, San Fernando.

Procurement Controversy

The Allamby contract award has attracted scrutiny from the Office of Procurement Regulation, which received formal complaints alleging that LandmarkTT applied a selective tendering process rather than open competitive bidding, potentially in breach of the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act. The OPR directed LandmarkTT to provide a full record of its procurement process, and LandmarkTT complied within the stipulated deadline. The investigation is ongoing.

Critics, including opposition members and independent property analysts, have called on the government to disclose the value of the lands being made available to private developers, arguing that withholding this information prevents a complete picture of the public investment in these projects. Property analyst Afra Raymond has noted that if private developers bear no significant financial risk in the arrangement because the state guarantees returns, it ceases to function as a genuine public-private partnership in the accepted sense of the term.

Caribbean Relevance

The LandmarkTT model reflects a growing regional interest in using state land as the primary lever for accelerating housing supply without committing large-scale public construction budgets. Variants of this approach are being explored across the Caribbean, from Antigua’s housing bond proposals to Guyana’s modular construction procurement drive. The common challenge is the same: how does a government with limited fiscal space expand housing supply quickly enough to meet genuine population need, while maintaining procurement integrity and ensuring that the benefits are distributed fairly rather than concentrated among politically connected developers?

Trinidad’s experience with both the HDC procurement crisis and the LandmarkTT controversy suggests that the answer to that question requires not just a new financial model but a substantially stronger governance framework than currently exists in the country’s housing sector.

Source: Trinidad Express / Trinidad Guardian, February 2026