SIBU: Banks should play a more positive role in assisting first-time house buyers, especially for the low and medium cost houses.
Assistant Housing Minister Datuk Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah believed this would greatly help the government’s effort to help people own houses, which would also help to stimulate the construction industry.
“It is heartening to see Sarawak Housing and Real Estate Developers’ Association (SHEDA) seriously making efforts to address the issues of housing loans with commercial banks as well as looking into coming up with its own Affordable Housing Scheme proposals,” Abdul Karim, who is Asajaya assemblyman, told reporters yesterday.
He was commenting on Sheda state council’s call for the Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) to relax purchasers’ Debt Service Ratio (DSR) on housing loans.
The suggestion was to enable more purchasers to qualify for housing loans under the Sheda Affordable Housing Scheme.
Abdul Karim lamented that commercial banks had not been helpful to the low income group in their applications for housing loans.
In most cases, their applications were rejected, he said, adding that the mergers of many banks had further aggravated the problem because most of the applications had to be referred to Kuala Lumpur for approval.
“It’s easier in fact to get a hire purchase loan for vehicles or get approval for credit cards than to get approval for housing loans despite the fact that landed property is used as collateral,” he said.
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