VietNamNet Bridge – The state has offered credit packages for the local real estate market and will amend more regulations and policies to promote further recovery in the local market, noted experts.

Apartment buildings on Ha Noi's Tran Duy Hung Street have been opened to the public.

During an online dialogue on the property market 2014, Phan Thanh Mai, the general director of the Bank of Construction, stated that the local property market has shown positive development over the past few months, including financial solutions from banks – VND30 trillion and VND50 trillion stimulus packages.

The VND30 trillion package, one of the government programmes, is aimed at providing credit for social housing projects. The package will help investors develop the social housing segment to meet the people's demands and help to push down the prices of housing apartments, thereby creating conducive factors to remove stagnation in the local property market, Mai added.

Meanwhile, the VND50 trillion package, which was recently released, is a commercial credit package for contractors, investors, and building material producers in the property sector, he remarked.

Banks will manage credit to use the money for the right purposes. The state expects that with the introduction of the package, investors will have more investment capital and the prices of building material products will also drop. Thus, the prices of houses and apartments will have a chance to fall against the current prices.

The state expected that the package would provide needed capital for unfinished property projects, Mai reported.

The two credit packages were aimed to achieve different purposes and expected to boost the market, he added.

However, according to Nguyen Huu Cuong, the chairman of the Ha Noi Real Estate Club, experts and even members of the National Assembly are of the viewpoint that disbursement of the VND30 trillion package is slow.

The slow disbursement might not mean that is unsuccessful, Cuong pointed out.

The package for social apartment projects, including buyers and investors with low interest rates, was issued at the right time when the market had fallen into serious crisis, he claimed.

The slow disbursement of the package was partly due to slow reaction by the people and enterprises towards the package, while on the other hand, procedures on appraising and approving the projects had been carefully implemented, he noted.

The package, a financial tool by the Government, had positive effects on the securities market to push the VN Index from 397.6 points at the end of 2012 to 569.87 points on Tuesday and lured US$21.6 billion investment into the property sector, he emphasised.

This support from the Government helped the local property market to cover losses and aided the development of the apartment segment having a selling price of around VND20 million per square metre. The package had saved 61,000 enterprises having thousands of property projects to avoid closure and bankruptcy, he explained.

Therefore, the package is expected to prove its efficiency in the future, as the package is effective until 2020.

Additionally, according to Nguyen Manh Ha, the director of the House Management Department, under the Ministry of Construction, the ministry and related ministries and sectors will amend the laws on trading property, construction, and housing to deliver more houses for the people and encourage all the economic sectors to invest into property products for the people.

Those laws will help people of the low-income group to own apartments and help the property market to have transparent development.

Cuong remarked that the amendment of the laws would abolish the administrative barriers for site clearance, create transparency in the market, and increase the prices of property products.

Source: VNS