Legal issues and a lack of transparency continue to cause problems for real estate trading centres.
Nguyen Tien Hie, chairman of Vietnam Global Holdings, believes that an important reason for the cold market transactions this year is that investors have lost confidence in the real estate products of the trading center, and most projects lack legal transparency.
I see a lot of potential money flowing, but it's really hard to gain the trust of users at the moment. There is currently a lack of transparency in real estate investment in the market, and some investors use their funds for the wrong purpose"Hiep says.
In Vietnam's real estate market, many projects have been put on hold due to legal process issues, which may involve planning approvals, construction permits, land use right certificates, fire protection, capital transfer qualification documents, and bank guarantee notices.
HIEP added that some developers use one project's cash** to invest in other projects, or even use deposits to make other financial investments, further confusing the issue.
Hoang Van Cuong, a member of the National Assembly's Finance and Budget Committee, believes that the responsibilities of the real estate trading center must be clearly defined to ensure the legitimacy of its activities.
cuong says:"If the information on the ** and legitimacy of the target project is incorrect, the dealing center must take responsibility and repay the client's deposit. "
Real estate trading centers in Vietnam sell products to home buyers on behalf of developers and earn profits through transaction fees. Generally, 2% of the value of the asset and up to 4% to 5% of the intermediary fee are charged. In some cases, intermediary fees can be as high as 8% for hard-to-** assets. These costs are added to ** and must be borne by the buyer.
Cuong explained that these trading centers often target short-term profits, which often leads to unprofessional operations that deceive customers with fake project advertisements. The sanctions currently imposed on trading centers are considered not strict enough to prevent such incidents from occurring.
According to the General Bureau of Statistics, more than 1,000 real estate businesses were dissolved or declared bankrupt in the first 10 months of this year, resulting in half of the country's real estate trading centers ceasing operations altogether.
The Ho Chi Minh City Construction Authority published a list of 61 active real estate trading centers and 17 discontinued real estate trading centers in the city on November 1.
The real estate trading centers that are currently closed are generally established after 2017, including the Goland trading center in District 1, the Wonderland and Vieland trading centers in District 3, and the Milestone Land trading center in Thu Duc.
Many enterprises have had to reduce the scale of investment in production and operation, streamline labor institutions, postpone investment activities and construction, or completely stop the implementation of new projects.
Normally, each developer has its own trading center to deal with customers. They are usually responsible for selling 80% of the developer's products. This condition was also considered unfair to third independent brokers, Cuong said.
In order to stop the instability of the market as a whole, at the sixth session of Congress held at the end of October, many deputies proposed a mandatory provision that every transaction should not be carried out through the trading center.
Wu Hongcheng, chairman of the National Assembly's Economic Committee, said that summarizing the implementation of the 2014 Real Estate Business Law shows that the current real estate trading centers do not ensure the transparency and legitimacy of transactions, as they are the beneficiaries of each transaction.
Therefore, the mandatory passage of transactions through real estate trading centres is not in line with the current legal regime. thanh says:"This provision also impedes commercial freedom and makes it possible to use the provisions of the law to monopolize and manipulate the market.
Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association Le Hoang Chau said
The real estate market is not transparent because the national database is not yet fully established and the data between different industries is not linked. To accomplish this, it is necessary to complete the relevant projects that are being carried out by the Ministry of Public Security.
The project is part of the overall direction to ensure that any individual's data must meet the requirements of all categories. When integrating all personal information into the project, there is only one personal identification number for each person.
In the past, a person could use multiple documents to purchase different real estate products. But now, we can check their transaction history with just a click of the mouse.
In this way, the tax department can collect taxes on different types of real estate through a single database. This will help to make the market transparent and also to the effective management of the country.
Real estate expert Nguyen Tien Dung said:
The introduction of a real estate data database will make the real estate market more transparent, especially through the number of real estate assets per person and ** to prevent tax leakage and limit corruption.
In the future, we can use this data to levy a second real estate tax to regulate the market and limit speculation and waste of land resources.
Individual real estate buyers and sellers can access and retrieve information to limit risk in the transaction. However, to do this successfully, good cooperation and ample time between the relevant departments are required.
In this process, it is necessary to avoid uncomfortable declarations and provide documents, and to ensure the security of information. The key lies in the uniformity of data across the country and strong coordination between governing bodies and individuals.