Contributing opinions to the draft Law on Real Estate Business (amended), the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association (HoREA) proposed to extend the time when businesses are allowed to receive deposits from customers for houses formed in the future in order to reduce capital pressure in the investment preparation phase.
The draft currently maintains the regulation that investors are only allowed to collect deposits when houses or construction works are eligible for business.HoREA believes that this regulation is not appropriate because by the time they are eligible for sale, businesses can sign a purchase and sale contract and collect the first payment according to current regulations.At that time, the limit of a maximum deposit of 5% is almost meaningless.
Therefore, HoREA proposes that investors be allowed to collect a deposit amount not exceeding 5% of the selling price or lease-purchase price of real estate when the project has been approved for investment policy, approved for investors or has a basic design appraised by a competent authority and has one of the land use right documents.The deposit agreement must clearly state the selling price or lease-purchase price of the product.
Mr. Le Hoang Chau, Chairman of HoREA, said that risks to customers are still controlled because the deposit is limited to a maximum of 5% of the real estate value and only applies to projects that have completed important legal procedures, instead of in the new stage of forming investment ideas.
However, many opinions believe that the above proposal brings everything back to the old story of disguised capital mobilization or, in other words, the form of collecting money from customers but "selling houses on paper".
Lawyer Nguyen Dang Tu, Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association, said that allowing deposit collection from the investment policy approval stage will have many risks. In fact, this is only the approval step from the State. Even when there is a construction permit, in many cases investors still cannot build foundations or legal obstacles cause progress to be stalled.
In fact, the real estate market in recent years has recorded many projects that, although they have collected money from customers in many forms of circumventing the law such as "holding seats", "registering aspirations"... but then the project is not implemented on schedule or cannot complete the legal documents to sign a purchase and sale contract.
This is causing homebuyers to mistakenly pay money to the investor and then have to wait many years and still not be signed a purchase and sale contract or receive back the deposit because the investor has lost the ability to pay or used capital for the wrong purpose.
In addition, according to the views of many economic experts, a maximum deposit of 5% for many large-scale projects can also help businesses mobilize hundreds of billions of VND before meeting the conditions for opening for sale.
The question is who supervises the use of this capital flow and is there any business that has committed to using this mobilized money for the right purpose only to build a project or to continue using it to roll over debts or to invest in other projects?
