Business  » Property

Ho Chi Minh City authorities are considering buying the unsold apartments of commercial projects citywide to supplement the municipal resettlement housing fund, the city’s property association has said.

HCMC’s Vice Chairman Nguyen Huu Tin had discussed such a policy with the association, said Le Hoang Chau, chairman of the HCMC Real Estate Association (HoREA), at the meeting with the association’s members this week.

The association has also been informed by the city’s construction department of the plan to purchase mid-sized apartments from 40 to 70 square meters each.

HCMC is now in need of building resettlement houses for households who will be relocated to clear sites for key projects such as the Thu Thiem New Urban Area, East-West Highway and Northwest Cu Chi Urban Area.

Still, a resettlement housing project will take a couple of years for completion, from site clearance to infrastructure construction.

Meanwhile, many property companies still have a considerable supply of available housing products.

Thus, if it’s carried out, the policy will add more units to the city’s resettlement housing fund while property firms are able to sell their products.

Le Chi Hieu, Chairman of Thu Duc Housing Development Corporation (Thuduc House), said this policy would bring good news to the market.

Chairman Chau of HoREA said the city’s government would ensure profits for project owners, and there was a high possibility that this policy would be deployed.

But it’s unclear how many units the city would buy.

Several enterprises however are concerned about how the city would pay for the purchase since the financial procedures would be cumbersome.

The central property management agencies have yet to publicize any official statistics on the unsold apartments on the national market. Nevertheless, a research of CB Richard Ellis Vietnam (CBRE) show there are over 18,000 unsold units in the so-called mid-end apartment segment alone as of last year’s end.