Sheda hopes to see state govt allocate more land for housing devt

KUCHING: Sarawak Housing and Real Estate Developers’ Association (Sheda) has always urged the state government to allocate more land for housing development to reduce the cost of houses.

The association said this in a statement following the recent request by Congress of Unions of Employees in the Public and Civil Service (Cuepacs) for the federal and state governments to reduce the cost of land and compliance cost to make houses more affordable to its members.

“Sheda is always asking the state government to increase more land for housing development to reduce the cost by turning more land in mixed zone within the 20km radius of cities and 10km radius within town areas. Sheda also encourages the government to build more roads and bridges to new areas so as to increase more suitable land for housing development,” Sheda pointed out in the statement yesterday.

Sheda also said that the state government a few years ago had relaxed the density of houses that can be built per acre from eight to 10 units, strata title building from 24 units to 30 units while in 2019 there was also special scheme for private developers to build even higher density of houses under Sri Pertiwi scheme with 12 units per acre for landed property and 50 units for strata titles building, where the selling price is controlled at not more than RM290,000 with built-up area of 900 sq ft per unit, and more houses of such type will be seen in the market this year.

Hence, the state government under the Ministry of Housing also has various public housing developments across the state selling below RM100,000 per unit while the state government has also announced that 2,400 units will be built across the state.

Apart from that, Sheda also said that the major cost of constructing houses can be divided into four elements; namely land cost, building cost, compliance cost or government’s legal requirements cost and bank or interest cost.

“Compliance cost includes utilities connection charges, open space, housing developer licence, sales and advertising permit, and the more rules and regulations being added to control the developers the more costly will be the cost of building houses while building costs constitute labour and material for the construction.

“Any new tax or increase of existing tax such as SST would increase the cost of construction. The strength of our ringgit also affects the cost of construction especially for imported materials and machinery,” said the statement.

Thus, the federal government can assist in house purchases through end financing with easier loan condition, instead of relying on proven income only, and Bank Negara should allow commercial banks to lend based on future increments in income, the statement added.

Any lowering of interest rates and increasing the loan tenure would also help in the affordability of home purchase, it pointed out.