Increasing supply is an urgent solution
The continuous increase in real estate prices makes the dream of owning a home increasingly distant for many people, especially young families. Therefore, stabilizing real estate prices and bringing land prices closer to their real value is one of the most concerned issues of the real estate market today.
In order to stabilize housing prices, many experts have proposed solutions to stabilize the real estate market towards transparent, healthy, stable and sustainable development.
Mr. Le Hoang Chau - Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association (HoREA) - said that increasing supply is an urgent solution to reduce housing prices. According to the Chairman of HoREA, the market situation is both imbalanced in supply and demand and imbalanced in the high-end and affordable housing segments, when the affordable segment has almost completely disappeared from the market. Therefore, to reduce housing prices, there must be a solution to increase supply, first of all by removing some shortcomings in legal regulations.
The expert also emphasized that the Government is making institutional breakthroughs to remove difficulties for the real estate market.
“We also welcome the Government’s assignment of ministries and sectors to develop three draft laws. We hope that all management agencies will coordinate to remove more than 500 projects to increase supply, reduce housing prices, and at the same time achieve the target of 1 million social housing units that the Government has launched,” Mr. Chau affirmed.
Promoting social housing development
Meanwhile, many experts believe that to help reduce housing prices, it is necessary to focus and promote more on developing social housing for middle-income people, achieving the goal of developing 1 million social housing units in the 2021-2030 period and contributing to adjusting the structure of housing products in the real estate market.
Ms. Cao Thi Thanh Huong, Senior Manager of Savills Research Department, analyzed that with the increasing urgent need for social housing, people expect a stronger involvement from the State.
To meet this demand, Ho Chi Minh City has set a target of providing 35,000 social housing units by 2025, while Hanoi has 8,000 units. Ms. Huong acknowledged that policies have been adjusted to create more favorable conditions for the development of social housing.
However, in reality, the development of social housing in the current market has not been as expected. Experts say that land fund is one of the reasons why the supply of social housing is difficult to achieve positive growth.
In the context of a shortage of social housing projects for people in real need in big cities, there are still many abandoned real estate projects causing waste.
According to the Vietnam Association of Realtors (VARS), in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City alone, there are at least 18,000 abandoned resettlement apartments. Large-scale buildings, with investments of thousands of billions of VND, are abandoned or used ineffectively, causing the entire infrastructure and items to seriously deteriorate.
Therefore, it is necessary to fully utilize the land fund for social housing development and use this land fund more effectively, avoiding waste while the need to develop housing for people with average and low incomes is an urgent issue.
Another solution has been proposed by some experts and the Ministry of Construction is also studying a proposal for a tax policy for cases of owning and using many houses and lands. However, this proposal is causing controversy, many experts believe that taxing real estate at this time is not appropriate, it is necessary to carefully study the time and method of taxing real estate, avoiding causing shock leading to massive sell-offs in the market.
