WHAT IS PUTRAJAYA DOING! House buyers' nightmare WORSENS

HOUSE buyers are one of the most "abused" groups of people. Many have had to exhaust their life savings to service bank loans that they took to buy houses that were never delivered.

There are hundreds of abandoned housing project sites throughout the country and statistics should have gone into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Housing ministers have come and gone and so, too, top officers like the secretaries-general but the nightmares of their abandoned houses continue to haunt these buyers until some light began to shine at the end of a long tunnel in 2012.

The then local government and housing minister, Tan Sri Chor Chee Heung, to his credit, showed exemplary political will by doing something his predecessors did not have the courage to change.

No less than in Parliament, he declared the mandatory implementation of the build-then-sell (BTS) system to replace the sell-then-build (STB) policy and Chor gave industry players three years to get their act together before full enforcement by next year.

It was a victory of sorts for NGOs like the National House Buyers' Association (HBA) and consumer associations which have been fighting for the longest time for the policy-change without success.

The new system is known as BTS 10:90 and is a hybrid of the sell-then-build and the absolute BTS. Under the new system, buyers need to pay the 10% deposit upon signing the sale and purchase agreement as in the current practice but the similarity ends here.

Under the current system, they will continue with their progressive payments based on the stage of the construction but with BTS 10:90 they do not pay anything more until the houses are completed with full certification and titles, complete with water and electricity supply.

Or in local jargon, until the buyer gets the house key.

Chor was only correcting one of perhaps many mistakes, weaknesses and loopholes that's typical of any man-made policy that on hindsight should not have occurred in the first place.

The sell-then-build system has been abused and taken advantage of by financially weak, bogus and fly-by-night developers who have absconded with buyers' deposits and progress payments running into hundreds of millions with the Housing Ministry, legal firms, banks and even Bank Negara seemingly powerless to do anything to make them accountable.

To make matters worse, these projects were sub-contracted to unlicensed developers and how such developers managed to escape enforcement shows there's truth about allegations of corruption in the industry.

But some relief or damage control does appear to have been done when the ministry and other authorities occasionally announce that some projects have been or are being rehabilitated by using taxpayers' money or some white knight coming to the rescue.

With its crusade in the interest of house buyers coming to bear fruit at last as 2015 looms on the horizon for the full implementation of the new policy, the HBA and other like-minded NGOs suddenly find themselves in a situation of being struck by lightning.

Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan, the minister of urban wellbeing, housing and local government, reversed the policy by announcing recently that developers are allowed to choose between the BTS and the old "sell-then-build" concept.

Wow! If this is not a classic case of government policy flip-flop, I don't know what else to call it. Maybe, the worst case of policy flip-flop I could think of.

The policy change Chor had initiated did not just come out of the blue. It was the culmination of countless discussions, forums, workshops and dialogues he held over the years with stakeholders such as developers, banks, the HBA, consumer associations and academics and he stood firm despite strong protests from developers.

With Abdul Rahman's "U-turn", the government has reneged on its commitment to curb errant developers from abandoning housing projects, said HBA secretary-general Chang Kim Loong.

Chang and HBA vice-president Brig-Gen (Rtd) Datuk Goh Seng Toh met me for coffee and I could see that they were absolutely upset over the policy reversal especially with the government priding itself on its "Janji ditepati" (Promise kept) slogan.

Goh said: "Just talk to some victims of abandoned projects and you will understand the hardships they go through. They have been suffering for scores of years; been made bankrupt for not settling their housing loans when they don't even have the houses to live in, let alone call their own; and some have already passed on while waiting!

"We anxiously await the government's 'Janji Ditepati'. We hope political will shall prevail."

Goh said HBA was not amused by Abdul Rahman's about-turn, adding that if developers were given the choice between the new policy and the one hated by buyers, common sense dictates that they would not opt to do business using their own funds when customers' funds were available.

He said industry players have even resorted to playing the race card to derail its implementation and scare the government from going ahead with it, claiming that small-scale bumiputra developers will be thrown out of business.

This is rubbish talk. Goh said every player in the industry will benefit because it will be operating in a more orderly and logical financing structure because rightfully developers should use their own financing to do business instead of customers' money as it is done during the collection of progressive payments.

Chang argued the BTS should be implemented because it's the only way to protect buyers from errant developers who now get away with impunity and will drastically, if not totally weed out bogus developers and cases of abandoned projects.

He said abandoned projects besides degrading the environment also cause unnecessary hardship to many people who need to continue with their monthly housing loan instalments. "And in many cases unless the projects are successfully revived, there's no end in sight as to how long they have to bear the ordeal," Chang said.

These victims along with HBA are now waiting for Abdul Rahman to revisit his decision and ensure that the interests of buyers outweigh that of the powerful and influential lobby group of property developers. Otherwise, as online news portal Bizkini rightly points out, it's back to square one for house buyers and the Malaysian dream of buying homes without the fear of projects being abandoned by developers will remain just that, a dream.

With an unprecedented 500,000 affordable homes to be built across the country under the 1Malaysia Housing Programme (PR1MA), the BTS system is even more necessary now than at any time before to prevent abuse. The onus is now on Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to put things right and veto Abdul Rahman's U-turn. -Sundaily