Is Affordable Housing A Threat To Developers?
Putrajaya’s affordable housing schemes for Malaysians has the potential to threaten private developers who may not be able to match the subsidised prices, warns a housing developers’ group.
Datuk Jeffry Ng Tiong Lip, research chairman of the Real Estate and Housing Developers’ Association, said while government’s affordable housing schemes were currently not a threat to private developers, that might not be the case in the long run.
Private developers had in the past decade up until 2014 mostly built high-end and larger condominium units, but had only adjusted in the past few years to rolling out projects in the affordable housing category in order to survive the downturn.
But private developers’ previous lack of interest in building affordable housing resulted in a gap between demand and supply of such homes for Malaysians, said Ng.
“As at today the gap where PR1MA homes and so many federal, state, local authority, ministry housing schemes have been able to fill the gap where private developers are only starting to adjust
“Even buying land for affordable homes takes time to buy a land, takes time to get approval, so that so-called gestation have then led to this gap, where it was filled up very nicely by the government and participating entities,” he was quoted as saying by news portal The Malay Mail Online.
“Now while I say that today it is not a threat, but moving forward we cannot say the same thing because as private sector developers start to roll out affordable homes, we are going to see an unlevelled playing field,” he added.
