This will help boost house ownership, especially for the B40 segment, said online property portal PropertyGuru Malaysia.
Country manager, Sheldon Fernandez, said the body could help manage the affordable housing programmes and issues relating to it under one roof, as affordable housing had been a long-standing issue in the country.
The B40 group refers to the bottom 40% of households with monthly incomes of between RM3,900 and RM8,300.
He said currently there were many affordable housing programmes handled by either state or federal governments, including Perumahan Rakyat 1Malaysia (PR1MA) and the Federal Territories Housing Scheme.
“PropertyGuru welcomes the government’s affordable housing schemes and supports the concerted efforts to provide homes for the middle-income segment.
“However, going forward, it would be good to see greater collaboration between the different programmes by state and federal governments as well as different agencies for the benefit of the Malaysian public,” he told Bernama in an interview recently.
He also said the income levels of Malaysians remained the fundamental challenge to owning a piece of property. At the same time property prices continued to be on the rise.
Fernandez said house prices in Malaysia were severely unaffordable from a local standpoint, as property prices were between 4.4 to 4.5 times the median income, whereas ideal prices should be three times the median income.
While welcoming initiatives taken by the government to add liquidity in the economy, including the option for employees to reduce their contributions to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) to 8% from the current 11%, Fernandez said more could be done including considering gross income to secure loans.
“One of the things when we talk about affordability is the age of the first-home buyers. What the government can do is to really look at the first-home buyers segment,” he added.
Meanwhile, on the Forest City project in Johor, Fernandez said, the cooling measures undertaken by the Chinese government recently to stabilise the yuan would impact property purchases from China.