By Farah Wahida:
The government should help out first-time homebuyers having difficulty obtaining loans from commercial banks, urged the Real Estate and Housing Developers’ Association Malaysia (Rehda)’s Penang branch.
Most prospective first-time home buyers do not qualify for a loan, which has also turned into a problem for developers, particularly those with fully completed projects.
“The biggest issue we foresee now is that there is demand, there will be greater supply. If the federal government does not address this issue, a lot of low-cost and low-medium cost units will remain unsold,” noted Datuk Jerry Chan Fook Sing, Chairman of Rehda Penang.
“Sometimes, we see a failure rate of 30 to 50 percent as the potential buyers are unable to get loans from banks,” he noted during his visit at the Grace Harmony Home.
Also present were Khoo Teik Ee, Chairman of Grace Harmony Home as well as Town and Country Planning and Housing Committee chairman Jagdeep Singh Deo.
Moreover, developers required to build low-medium cost and low-cost houses are also faced with long delays in securing the approved list of buyers from the state housing department, said Chan.
Although the project is fully completed, the allocation of the units cannot be fulfilled sometimes as “the names provided in the list have a very low take-up rate of between three and five percent.”
“So, you have the situation where the state wants the developers to build… but we are unable to allocate the units,” said Chan.
In responding, Jagdeep revealed plans to establish a selection process committee that will help improve the allocation process.
“I want to announce the formation of this committee, which we hope to sit after the next exco meeting, hopefully by early next month.”
Notably, the committee will be a site of reference for the present mechanism of allocation of low-medium cost and low-cost houses from the beginning of the project to the actual turnover of the house to the buyers.
Farah Wahida, Editor of PropertyGuru, wrote this story. To contact her about this or other stories email farahwahida@propertyguru.com.my
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