Eight measures reinforce recently announced govt policies

In apparent support of the city administration's lead in setting new residential development guidelines to curb housing-market speculation and overly rapid property price increases, the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) Monday sanctioned eight measures.

"All eight main policies are based on four main principles: fairness, designing policies that are property-user friendly, promoting property developers' discipline in making declarations of connected transactions and enhancing information transparency in the process of property transactions," said Barry Cheung Chun-yuen, chairman of the government-controlled developer.

These measures will apply to all property projects to be jointly developed by the URA and private developers. The URA will encourage developers to adopt the new measures for existing projects.

Concerning fairness, the URA will prohibit property developers from making any more internal transactions and will require that developers putting the first lot of flats for sale first get the consent of the URA.

The URA will implement three measures to benefit property users. First, for the introduction of flats under any URA redevelopment projects, it will allow only personal property transactions. Second, the URA will limit the proportion of corporate property transaction to only 10 percent of all saleable flats; that is to say, 90 percent will be reserved for personal transactions. Third, property purchasers can buy no more than two flats.

The URA also stipulates that, if the senior management or its related parties of the involved developers are making any property transaction, they must declare this to the URA in writing.

In enhancing information transparency, they have to publish all transaction information, including the property sites and transaction prices within one day after the transaction. This information has to be updated on the company websites and in the property site areas.

"If any developers are violating these measures, they will be forbidden to bid any URA redevelopment projects for 6 to 12 months. I am confident that the developers will abide by these new measures," Cheung declared.

Cheung reiterated that the URA is responding to market demand. He added that for the next 18 months, approximately 60 percent of the URA flats will be medium-sized. He disclosed that the recent Ma Tau Wai project will provide flats with a total area of no more than 500 square meters.

However, since the Town Planning Board (TPB) had already designed the current project layout, the flats' size area in these projects will not be customized as medium-sized ones, Cheung added.

"The URA will evaluate the measures occasionally in response to the changing market situations," said Cheung.

The administration maintains that all recently proclaimed measures are enough to control the property bubble for the moment.

"Nearly 55,000 flats will be provided in the private primary market in the next couple of years. The administration will make more public land auctions in appropriate time. Also, the Housing Authority is now examining the invigoration of the Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) secondary market. I think all these measures will help to alleviate the recent shortages of flats in the market," Acting Secretary for Transport and Housing Yau Shing-mu said Monday in a Legislative Council committee.

China Daily

(HK Edition 05/04/2010 page2)