Thousands more apartments for rent
At the end of June, the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction coordinated with Becamex Group (Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee) to start construction of social housing and rental housing projects. The new point this time is that in addition to social housing for sale to workers and laborers, there will be many apartments for rent according to the policy of competent authorities. The 4 projects started by Becamex Group this time have a total scale of 6,229 apartments, of which about 1,000 apartments will be developed according to the rental model.
Mr. Nguyen Hoan Vu - General Director of Becamex Group shared that, implementing the direction of the Central Government on developing rental housing also in this place, with the available clean land fund, the Group also plans to continue investing in about 2,000 more rental houses in the next phase. Thereby, gradually diversifying social housing types suitable to the actual needs of workers.
At the conference to deploy and promote investment in rental housing development in the city, 13 organizations and businesses registered to build nearly 100,000 rental houses in the city.
According to a report from the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction, the public property rental housing fund in Ho Chi Minh City currently has 13,668 rooms/apartments for rent and 40,980 accommodations for students. In addition to social housing for rent in social housing projects that do not use public investment capital, the city has been and is promoting the concentration of investment in construction and creation of social housing for rent in the following forms:
Public investment (target of 10,000 units); investment through the National Housing Fund model at the central and local levels (proposed target of 35,000 units); calling for investment in worker accommodation (target of 15,000 units); converting the target of housing funds belonging to public assets serving resettlement, resettlement projects to social housing for rent (target of 8,000 units).
Control rental prices suitable for workers
According to reporters of Lao Dong Newspaper, the rental price varies greatly between segments. Social housing apartments with an area of 55m2 are priced at about 6.5 million VND/month, while commercial apartments with the same area are up to 15 million VND/month. Some small apartments for young people have rental prices of about 8 million VND/month.
Due to the limited supply of social housing and affordable rental housing, most workers and low-income people still have to choose boarding rooms or mini-apartment models. Common rental prices range around 2 million VND per month, but living conditions, infrastructure and amenities in many boarding houses are not guaranteed.
Mr. Le Hoang Chau - Chairman of HoREA - assessed that housing rental costs are currently the largest expenditure in the budget of many workers. According to international experience, housing rental costs at about 20% of monthly income are appropriate; if exceeding 25%, workers will face many difficulties in ensuring their lives and regenerating labor.
From this perspective, Mr. Chau supports the orientation of researching a mechanism to control rental prices suitable to people's affordability. Along with developing supply, Mr. Chau believes that there should be solutions to protect tenants from unreasonable price increases or sudden termination of rental contracts.
And to encourage businesses to invest in rental housing, Mr. Chau proposed that the State exempt land use fees and land rent for the area that businesses voluntarily agree to receive transfer to implement rental housing projects with prices suitable to the affordability of middle and low-income people.
Green channel" mechanism to develop rental housing
To develop rental housing in the coming time, Ho Chi Minh City said that it will implement synchronously groups of solutions. Specifically, deploy public investment in rental housing projects and report to the Standing Committee of the City Party Committee to include them in urgent projects as a basis to accelerate procedures and soon start construction, and at the same time assign the Housing Development Fund to focus on creating housing for rent.
The city is having a package to support all interest rates for social housing and worker accommodation projects that are lent interest rate support by the Ho Chi Minh City State Financial Investment Company (HFIC) with a maximum capital of 200 billion VND/project, term not exceeding 7 years.
In addition, to attract investors to participate in investing in building rental housing, the city will add rental housing types to the list of supported projects, and at the same time add to increase the maximum loan capital of projects supported by the budget with maximum interest rates from 200 billion VND/project to 300 billion VND/project.
Support 100% of the investment costs for construction of technical infrastructure works within the project scope but not exceeding 10 billion VND/project; support reducing house rental prices for social housing subjects registering to rent rental housing types invested by enterprises.
