It is known that Ms. Do Thi Loan - Vice President of the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association - is currently the owner of the V5-1002 apartment at Sunrise City South apartment building. She did not pay the water bill because she thought that the monthly service fee announcement of CBRE Vietnam - the building management unit - said that the water volume was too high, too unreasonable. The average monthly water consumption is continuously over 12 m3/person/month.
Ms. Loan believes that this is a very unreasonable number, because she lives alone, the house is cleaned once a week, laundry is done several times a week, there is no fish pond, no swimming pool, no garden, no reception, no parties, etc.
According to Ms. Loan, during the time the apartment had a water outage, she had to go outside to get water for daily use. However, recently, the Apartment Management Board did not allow her to use an elevator to transport water to the apartment. Therefore, every day, she has to buy bottled mineral water to serve her family's daily needs, and her clothes are also washed outside the laundry shop. Currently, Ms. Loan has sent petitions to many departments and branches.
Responding to Lao Dong Newspaper, CBRE said that there was fraud in calculating the domestic water index and calculating water bills for residents in general and Ms. Loan in particular. CBRE has enough documents to prove this.
The building has a clock that measures the total water consumption of all apartments. Every month, the Management Board (BQL) receives the water bill for the entire building and collects the domestic water bill from residents to pay Nha Be Water Supply Company.
Each apartment in the building is equipped with a separate water consumption meter, located on the technical axis of each floor. Every month, the Management Board will read and record the water consumption index of each apartment and calculate water bills based on the amount of water consumed by the apartment and the current water bill unit price. In case residents do not pay the water bill on time, the Management Board is forced to stop supplying water to that apartment until residents pay in full.
CBRE said that Ms. Loan did not pay the water bill for use for 3 consecutive months (from October to December 2024) with a total amount of VND 1,026,432. The Building Management Board Office was forced to stop supplying water to Ms. Loan's apartment from January 7, 2025. The suspension of this water supply is in accordance with the provisions of Clause 3.5.5, Article 3 of the Building Internal Regulations.
According to the Management Board, the water consumption at Ms. Loan's apartment V5-1002 in the period from January 2023 to September 2024 remained stable, with no signs of change during the monitoring period. The average water consumption in the first 12 months of 2023 was 19m3/month. The average water consumption from January to September 2024 is 18.7m3/month.
When Ms. Loan allowed someone to transport the water buckets from outside into the elevator, the Building Management Department Office was forced to prevent Ms. Loan from using an elevator to transport water to the apartment. The reason is that in the past, there was an incident causing water to overflow in Tower V2 of the building, damaging the elevator, causing interruption of elevator operation, greatly affecting the operation and movement of other residents.
During the time of managing and operating Sunrise City South up to now, the building management board has only recorded one complaint about the water consumption index from Ms. Loan's V5-1002 apartment. CBRE also said that this unit had worked with Nha Be Water Supply Company, asking Ms. Loan to allow the installation of an auxiliary water meter for monitoring for 90 days, but Ms. Loan did not respond to CBRE.
