Every day when I come back from work, I have to struggle to live in a 20m2 rented room in Phu Do, Nam Tu Liem District (Hanoi), making Mr. Do Van Tung (32 years old) and his wife feel suffocated and tired.
Mr. Tung shared that the rental house he is renting has never been considered a real house. Both husband and wife are saving and borrowing to buy a house even though it is far from the center.
However, the increasingly high housing prices are causing Mr. Tung to gradually disappear his dream of buying a house in Hanoi.
"I have lived in Hanoi for more than 10 years and work as an office worker. I realized that there will be a young generation like me who will find it difficult to buy a house in Hanoi if prices continue to increase like this. I am wondering whether to continue to stay in Hanoi or return to my hometown to live" - Mr. Tung said.
Mr. Tran Quang Trung - Business Development Director of OneHousing - said that at present, waiting for housing prices, especially apartment prices to decrease, is not feasible.
Mr. Trung affirmed that if previously the price of apartments in central locations was around 100 million VND/m2, customers felt it was too expensive, then for apartment projects with beautiful locations, the price could be up to 200 million VND/m2.
At the 5th Annual Spring Real Estate Forum, organized by the Vietnam Real Estate Association and the Vietnam Institute for Real Estate Research, economic expert Dr. Can Van Luc - a member of the National Financial and Monetary Policy Advisory Council - said that the selling price is too high and tends to increase in 2024, which reduces the ability of the majority of people to access housing.
According to Dr. Luc, high housing prices also make many people consider borrowing money from banks to buy a house, the home loan ratio of banks in 2024 stagnates, increasing by only 6%, while the general credit growth in the same period is 15%.
This person added that calculating with the current average apartment selling price and the average income of a household in 2024, the accumulation time to buy a house for a household is about 23.7 years. Thus, a civil servant can only buy an apartment if he has worked for almost the rest of his life.
What is more worrying is that the time households accumulate to buy a house tends to increase, although people's income is improving. It shows that the rate of increasing housing prices is many times faster than the level of improving the income of the majority of people.
Explaining the situation of housing prices increasing by 40% in 2024, Dr. Can Van Luc said that there are many reasons such as projects facing legal problems. In particular, high input costs, including informal costs, and imbalance between supply and demand.
There are very few projects, so investors only develop projects with high profit margins (middle-range, high-end projects). On the other hand, real estate speculation activities are still popular.
From there, Dr. Luc recommended that the State should continue to improve the institutions on land, construction and real estate, in which, paying attention to the implementation stage.
In addition, it is necessary to diversify capital sources and develop real estate finance, resolutely fight waste in the fields of land, real estate, public assets, public investment, to create momentum for economic growth, while creating conditions for the real estate market to develop more healthily and transparently.
