KUALA LUMPUR, March 2 — The Local Government Development Ministry (KPKT) has identified 166 housing projects completed late, 437 projects sick and 115 projects abandoned as of Jan 31, said its deputy minister Akmal Nasrullah Mohd Nasir.
He said on the overall this year, KPKT projected that there would be 354 late projects and 538 sick projects if there was no intervention from the government.
“When we set up a task force for sick and abandoned private housing projects, we focused on four roles, namely tracking, resolving, preventive and forward modeling.
“Yesterday when I went down to a hospital project site, we found that the 2023 trend is increasing and to be transparent and honest, the tracking data we create is not only according to the existing classes which are late, sick and abandoned but the task force also assessed in terms of projections that will happen this year,” he said.
Akmal Nasrullah was replying to a supplementary question by Batu Pahat MP Onn Abu Bakar, who wanted to know the number of sick and abandoned projects as of this year, at Dewan Rakyat today.
A total of 15,024 borrowers benefited from the Housing Credit Guarantee Scheme (HCGS) through total financing of RM1.91 billion with the scheme being housing financing without the need to pay an advance and they are offered to people who do not have a fixed income or the gig economy group.
Meanwhile, to help first-home buyers, he said KPKT has implemented initiatives such as the Malaysian Housing Financing (i-Biaya) in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance.
The ministry also announced the i-Miliki initiative which involves the provision of stamp duty exemption incentives on transfer documents and loan agreements for the purchase of the first house for homes worth up to RM1 million.
— Bernama
