On July 22, at the Workshop "Unlocking capital sources for a sustainable real estate market" organized by Thanh Tra Newspaper, Mr. Ha Quang Hung - Deputy Director of the Housing and Real Estate Market Management Department (Ministry of Construction) - said that in the past time, besides developing commercial housing according to market mechanisms, the Party and State have promoted the development of social housing and worker housing to care for and create conditions for low-income people.
According to Mr. Hung, Vietnam has created a relatively complete, synchronous, and open institutional and legal corridor, ensuring support and encouragement for businesses to participate in social housing development.
He cited a series of preferential policies being applied such as land use fee exemption; exemption and reduction of value-added tax (VAT), corporate income tax; support for investment in technical infrastructure inside and outside the project; lending at preferential interest rates...
Thanks to that, in 2025, the whole country completed more than 103,000 social housing units, reaching 103% of the plan. In the first 6 months of 2026, there are 270 projects under construction with a scale of 269,409 units; and at the same time, 62 new social housing and rental housing projects with a scale of 65,065 units were started.
The number of projects completed, started and approved for investment policy by 2026 reached 77% compared to the target of the Project to build 1 million social housing apartments," Mr. Hung informed.
Besides the results achieved in social housing development in particular and housing in general, according to Mr. Hung, the housing real estate market still has many shortcomings and obstacles. Specifically, the market is out of balance between supply and demand when the supply of the high-end segment is surplus but there is a shortage of affordable housing; the product structure is leaning towards housing for sale, lacking long-term rental housing to meet actual demand; house prices are too high, many times higher than the average income level, making it difficult for workers in large cities to access; the current preferential mechanism is not attractive enough to attract the private sector to invest in developing rental housing.
Mr. Hung said that the Ministry of Construction is coordinating with ministries, branches, and localities to summarize the implementation of Directive No. 34 of the Secretariat on strengthening the Party's leadership over social housing development in the new situation. On that basis, the Ministry will propose to issue appropriate documents from the Politburo to serve as a basis for completing the system of legal documents related to housing development and the real estate market.
At the same time, the Ministry of Construction is amending and supplementing the Housing Law, the Real Estate Business Law and related legal regulations, submitting them to the National Assembly for comments at the extraordinary session in August and considering approval at the session in October 2026.
According to the orientation, housing development will be divided into 4 groups including: commercial housing, rental housing, public housing and policy housing. In which, priority is given to developing rental housing at reasonable prices from state resources; and at the same time, there are strong preferential policies on land, finance, taxes, credit... for long-term rental housing projects to create strong enough momentum to attract private capital flows and long-term investment funds to participate. The Ministry will also research and develop standards and standards for each housing group according to the new model.
Mr. Hung added that the Ministry of Construction has requested localities to urgently review and comprehensively assess housing needs, especially rental housing and official housing, and at the same time identify housing models and types suitable to the actual conditions of each locality.
Along with that, localities need to review land funds in urban areas, economic zones, industrial parks, high-tech parks and rapid urbanization areas to proactively clear ground, prepare clean land funds, and invest in synchronous infrastructure connections to serve the development of rental housing.
The Ministry of Construction also proposed that localities proactively invest in building rental housing using local budget funds; and effectively use the National Housing Fund in localities to invest in construction and establish rental housing funds in the area.
