The bus leaves Faridpur in the morning and reaches Dhaka before lunch. A few years ago that sentence would have sounded wrong to anyone who knew the old road. The ferry queue at Mawa could eat half a day, and a trip to the capital had to be planned like a small expedition. Now the Dhaka-Mawa-Bhanga Expressway runs straight across the Padma Bridge, and the journey from Faridpur to Dhaka takes about one and a half hours, according to reporting by The Business Standard in 2023. The same report put the old journey at six to eight hours. That change in time is the one fact nobody disputes. Everything else about housing in the south-west follows from it, in ways that are still taking shape.
Drive the expressway today and the building is hard to miss. Plots are marked out beside the road. Low apartment blocks stand half finished, with bamboo scaffolding and piles of brick. Hoardings promise flats, ready houses, duplex villas and plots in new residential areas. The Business Standard reported in June 2023 that at least 200 housing projects had come up along the expressway, and that around 200 members of the Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh had invested nearly Tk2 lakh crore in them. The figure comes from the association, and it dates from 2023. It is a measure of intent and money committed at that point, not a count of finished homes.
Who is building, and where
The largest of the projects named in that reporting sits in Sirajdikhan, in Munshiganj. Amin Mohammad City covers 803 acres of land beside the expressway, according to the same report. The developer also runs a second project on the road, called The Valley, where it sells duplex buildings and plots. Other projects line the route near Mawa, including Probashi Palli Group on about 200 bighas in Louhajang and New Dhaka City on 150 bighas in Sirajdikhan. The pattern is consistent. Developers are buying land where the road runs, and they are selling it to people whose families come from the south.
What the towns themselves are seeing
Faridpur, Gopalganj and Jashore are not turning into Dhaka suburbs overnight. They are district towns with their own pace, their own bazaars and their own housing stock. What has changed is the flow of people and goods through them. The Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation planned seven large industrial estates in the southern region, including Faridpur and Jashore, with Tk8,000 crore from government funds, according to The Business Standard in August 2023. The plan aimed at 14 to 15 lakh new jobs. Plans are not jobs, and the estates are still being built.
The price question, stated plainly
Readers will ask the obvious question. Have prices gone up? The honest answer is that no current, verified price series for these towns exists in public reporting. Older reporting gives a sense of the shift without settling it. The Business Standard reported in 2023 that land prices in the expressway area had risen four to five times, depending on position and type, after the bridge opened. The Daily Star reported in December 2024 that a developer was asking about Tk15-16 lakh per katha in its project area, with a three-katha plot at about Tk45-50 lakh on a payment plan of five to seven years. Those are asking prices from a single developer, reported at the time. They are not a market index, and they are not current.
That gap matters for anyone thinking of buying. A plot beside a new road can be a good home and a poor purchase at the same time, if the price already assumes a future that has not arrived. The checks that protect a buyer are the same as in Dhaka: a clear title, a mutation record, approval from the local authority, and a written agreement that says what will be built and when.
The bridge has done what big roads do. It has made distance shorter, and it has made land beside the road more interesting to developers. Houses are going up in Sirajdikhan, Louhajang, Bhanga and the towns beyond. Families are moving between Dhaka and the south-west more easily than they did four years ago. Whether that becomes a lasting housing market, with finished homes, schools, clinics and jobs to match, will be decided in the next few years, street by street, in Faridpur, Gopalganj, Madaripur and Jashore. The road is built. The towns are still being made.
