August 1, 2024, is the time when three new laws including the Land Law 2024, Housing Law 2023 and Real Estate Business Law 2023 officially take effect. The positive effect right before the new laws take effect is very clear on the real estate market.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Construction, in the first 6 months of the year, real estate transactions had about more than 253,000 successfully sold products, equal to 110.26% compared to the last 6 months of 2023. The number of transactions mainly focused on segment piece of land. Regarding selling price, the average asking price of apartments in the entire market tends to increase from the end of 2023 to the present time, especially in large cities such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
Experts assess that accelerating the official effective date of the above three laws compared to regulations will make a positive contribution, helping to quickly resolve problems related to land valuation, site clearance, resettlement, implementation of social housing project. From there, it contributes to promoting the development of the market.
However, there is still a view that the new legal framework also puts a lot of pressure on businesses to comply, especially in the context that restructuring debt and assets is still a big challenge. Legal bottlenecks are also factors that prevent many projects from being able to bring cash flow to the market, leading to businesses running out of cash flow.
Lawyer Nguyen Dang Tu, TriLaw Law Office, said that although new specialized real estate laws will take effect soon, they still need time to penetrate. Meanwhile, to save the difficult situation recently and help businesses make money, they must have qualified products to sell on the market right now. But if you want to have a new product, the law must be removed, but you still have to wait until the removal is complete.
In fact, the project's prolonged legal problems are reflected in the inventory structure and this is a huge burden for real estate businesses. Sharing at the recent seminar "Real estate investment focus in the new context", Mr. Le Hong Khang, Director of analysis and credit rating FiinRatings, said that by the first half of this year, the business situation of FiinRatings was Real estate business is basically still low compared to the average of the past 5 years.
The situation has improved, but not significantly. FiinRatings' assessment is based on stories related to debt, profitability, and profit quality of real estate businesses which are only average.
Except for a few large-scale businesses with clean land funds and clear legalities that can record positive business results this year, the majority of medium-sized real estate businesses are in a waiting position. .
FiinRatings believes that the market outlook in the next 1-2 years will still recover slowly. Positive points from legal or policy factors will take time to absorb. According to a representative of FiinRatings, most real estate businesses have to face and handle a huge problem, which is that the ability to access capital is much more difficult than in the previous period.
Previously, businesses could access diverse and flexible sources of capital, from investment cooperation contracts, from home buyers, bonds, bank loans... However, these channels are currently facing many difficulties. , including with bank loan channels.
Next is the issue of capital increase. After the process of focusing on collecting land funds, when there was a legal blockage, the financial plan changed a lot, some projects even had a capital increase of 20 - 30% compared to the original. This may cause the investor's capacity to no longer be guaranteed to develop the rest of the project, forcing them to come up with solutions such as transfer or investment cooperation.
