Leong is wishing for more government incentives to ease first-timers' home-buying process.
PETALING JAYA: Property developer Mah Sing Group Bhd's (Mah Sing) wishlist for the upcoming year of 2023 includes homeownership measures, changes in foreign property ownership, cost reduction, labour shortage solutions and incentives for green and technology-centric initiatives.
“We hope that the government will implement additional initiatives to help first-time home buyers, easing their home-buying process and accelerate the property industry's recovery,” Mah Sing founder and group managing director Tan Sri Leong Hoy Kum said.
Examples of these measures include a first-time home buyer’s grant of RM30,000 for properties priced up to RM500,000; to reactivate the MyHome Scheme programme to eligible purchasers; lower, fixed-rate financing for first-time home buyers, for properties priced up to RM500,000; and a higher margin of financing up to 100% for first properties to assist the M40 and B40 groups affected by the pandemic.
The second point of Mah Sing’s wishlist is the standardisation and reduction of the threshold for foreign property ownership to RM600,000.
With the property industry impacted by the labour shortage and rising construction costs, Leong also called on the government to lift the taxes and levies imposed on imported construction materials and facilitate a supply of foreign labour.
“We hope that the government will look into expediting the process of bringing in foreign labours and ideally, accelerating the process of migrant worker approval in a more effective manner to help local businesses grow,” Leong said.
On the government’s goal to become a carbon-neutral nation by 2050, he said: “We hope that the government will continue to support and expand green building development. We hope that the government will consider providing small grants to developers to encourage industry participants to incorporate more green features into their developments and to use renewable energy sources such as solar panels.”
Following the increase in sustainable development incentives, he also called for more incentives to increase the adoption of technology-focused measures such as the Industrialised Building System (IBS) and Building Information Modelling (BIM).
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