Boosting the market? Better educate and ‘fight back’ lah

We have often read about how the government should relax some of the cooling measures and do more to boost the property market. I think Budget 2018 was not considered an awesome one when it comes to boosting the property market. From certain incentives to 100% loans and all the way to reducing duties and even leniency in approving loans, these have never stopped. The reason is because there is now an oversupply of units. Here’s that report.  As a working professional who had to view 30 homes before I bought my first property around 15 years ago, here’s my take about this ‘boosting the property market.’
Nearly one month ago, I received one same news article from three different Whatsapp groups. In fact, I received the 4th one just 2 weeks ago. It was a ‘bold article’ about property bubble bursting very soon and house prices falling from RM500k to RM300k. This prediction was based on an oversupply report which I have also personally written about much earlier than that ‘bold prediction’ article. Here’s my article: Unsold units up 40 pct. Strategy ahead?  Within the next couple of days, there were so many other articles from prominent property people, all providing their views on the matter and the message is similar. Property market is slow. There are oversupply of properties which people could not afford. Developers and the government must focus on building more affordable homes. Yet, I receive NONE from any of my Whatsapp group. So, should we focus on BOOSTING the market? Frankly, no.
Regardless of who the experts are, I think we are missing one big point about the demand for property in Malaysia. Based on homeownership numbers, 1 million civil servants do not own a home, yet.  Based on my own survey of my friends, more than half do not yet own their own home. Probably because most of my colleagues are still young. Based on the questions I have received in kopiandproperty email, I can safely say that most of the time, the question is about whether they should buy that first property. What does this tell us? DEMAND is available. There is no need to BOOST the property market by becoming too lenient. What we need however is to tell the right side of the story so that these people needing a home and could afford one actually buys one. They should not only listen to one side of the story (which is untrue) and then decided that it’s best to wait, eventhough they could qualify for the loan. Reminder, over 70 percent of all loan approvals were approved in 2017 thus far.  
Tell everyone today and please stop spreading xxxxxx news and think that it will not affect the market. Time to ‘fight back’ with more educational news perhaps. Remember, when every news first-time home buyers  receive in their Facebook and their Whatsapp are negative, will they buy? Or dare to buy? Becoming too lenient may only encourage those who already own properties to buy more properties. Serious. First time is always the hardest.  It is not about spreading fake POSITIVE news okay. It’s about giving people the right to view both sides of the story. Today, only the negative side is shared. Did everyone know that the export numbers for October was very healthy? Did everyone know that the ringgit has stabilised since a crazy 2016 which was NOT due to export vs import but because of some stranger in some countries outside trading our currencies? Happy following and please do disagree. It’s your right and also mine too.   🙂
written on 9 Dec 2017
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