KUALA LUMPUR: The government should implement additional initiatives to help first-time home buyers, easing their home-buying process and accelerate the property industry's recovery, Mah Sing Group Bhd said.
Its founder and group managing director Tan Sri Datuk Leong Hoy Kum said one of the potential initiatives was to ease financing schemes for first time home buyers on properties of up to RM500,000.
"We hope that the government will implement additional measures aimed at first-time home buyers, specifically in home financing, to increase home ownership," he said in a statement today.
Mah Sing's budget wishlist also includes a one-off first time home buyers' grant of RM30,000 for property priced up to RM500,000 and to reactivate the MyHome Scheme programme to eligible purchasers.
He suggested lower, fixed rate financing for first time home buyers, for properties priced up to RM500,000 and higher margin of financing up to 100 per cent for first properties to assist the M40 and B40 groups affected by the pandemic.
"For all buyers, we propose restoring the maximum loan tenure to 40 years, referring to gross income rather than net income for loan applications and allowing down payments to be made directly from the Employee Provident Fund Account 2," he said.
Mah Sing also hopes the government will consider lifting the taxes and levies imposed on imported construction materials.
Tan said according to the Real Estate and Housing Developers' Association Malaysia (Rehda), the three most important factors affecting developers' costs were compliance, construction materials and labour, followed by financing and land.
"The increase of construction material costs such as steel, aluminium, cement, concrete, glass, copper and timber, are anticipated to increase by an average of 19 per cent this year. This will increase the challenges on property developers, on top of other challenges such as inflationary pressures and economic uncertainties," said Tan.
The company extended its wish for the government to reduce and standardise minimum threshold for foreign property ownership to RM600,000.
With the current currency rate, Tan said it would attract foreigners to invest in tangible investments.
Tan said there was also a need to resolve labour shortage problem as the industry had been seriously impacted by the delay in site progress, as well as the driving the investors away.
"To meet demand and restore the economy's momentum, the construction industry currently requires 500,000 workers, primarily from Indonesia and Bangladesh.
"We hope that the government will look into expediting the process of bringing in foreign labours and ideally, accelerating the process of migrant worker approval in a more effective manner to help local businesses grow," he said.
Other measures included in the wishlist were incentives for developments incorporating green features and incentives for adoption of Industrialised Building System and Building Information Modelling.