KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Most existing housing policies for the social and private sectors were built on patchy data taken from silo sources, causing distortion in supply and pricing for a property market marked by severe unaffordability, researcher Suraya Ismail said today.
The Khazanah Research Institute (KRI) housing expert told a forum on the topic here that the public and private sector have been unable to address structural defects in the housing sector due to a dearth of data, or in some cases, unwillingness by different parties to share them.
“Data should be the final arbiter of what should be done,” Suraya said during a presentation delivered after KRI unveiled the report at Menara UEM here.
Yet, federal agencies, as well as state and private developers often rely on limited sets of data usually compiled by specific agencies for very specific locations and purposes when planning, she noted.
As a result, policymakers often come up with inadequate solutions.
Suraya said the quagmire is best exemplified by the federal government’s attempt to coordinate housing supply outside the capital city through a centralised agency, which tends to have scarce data on the unique situation in the respective states.
“You cannot have one single model and (blanket) use it on the whole Malaysia without thinking of the spatial issues,” she stressed.
“Mind you, we have many state agencies, say PR1MA or SPNB, which want to penetrate Kota Baru. Look at the condition of Kota Baru and let the state decide how many houses should be built at what price range, that’s what you should do.
“Not let (federal agencies) coordinate everything,” she added.
PR1MA is a government-linked company set up to supply affordable homes. SPNB is the National Housing Company. Both are technically federal agencies but critics said the two, as with most government departments, often work without any inter-agency coordination.
Suraya’s assertion comes as KRI released a fresh study on the state of housing titled “Rethinking Housing: Between State, Market, and Society”, a document of over 200 pages that again highlights unresolved problems confronting the residential market.
Since the last report released in 2015, the new research showed much of the problems KRI drew attention to then such as supply shortages, refusal to invest in modern construction technology, poor planning, and problematic land and valuation policies have persisted.
Experts and government officials were invited to today’s forum to discuss the conundrum, but the panelists were nowhere close to an agreement or finding solutions.
The Real Estate and Property Development Association, for example maintained that private developers cannot rectify the pricing side without the cooperation of state or other related agencies.
Often the target of public lashing over rising home prices, Rehda have maintained that making homes affordable requires the commitment of all relevant players, particularly the states because land premiums comprise the biggest share in development costs.
Land and related charges like assessment tax and quit rent fall under state purview. The group has long blamed regulation as a cost factor, and claimed prices can only go down if the states make land cheaper or regulatory charges cheaper.
“Cost again. Why is it not affordable. It’s like baking a cake, if the ingredients are costly...it would become unaffordable,” Rehda president Datuk Soam Heng Choon told the forum.
“We need all players to cooperate.”
Meanwhile, director-general of the National Housing Department, Jeyasalan K. Navaratnam, agreed with KRI’s findings that data is crucial to enable a workable policy that frame the housing problem not just in supply and demand terms, but also of quality.
Mobility, for example, is a crucial component for housing, he said. How far one travels to work and expenses incurred from should be included in a policy framework. Solving mobility was among key recommendations KRI made in the report.
Most Malaysians now commute from far distances to get to work because only homes located further from the city are affordable in the ringgit sense, but taxing for overcall costs.
“Mobility means what is the amount of expenses you pay for mobility...but mobility is not only about expenses but also a loss of time,” Jeyasalan said.
“Unfortunate thing with administration management or planning in this country is nobody look at these costs.”
