Napic reports: Look at the bigger picture, says former D-G

NST-Prop 18/3/2006 By Fadzil Fauzi

Complaints about “the long interval” between issuance of the country’s quarterly property market reports have been brushed aside by former Director-General of the Finance Ministry’s Valuation and Property Services Department (VPSD), Datuk Mani Usilappan.

“A quarterly report cannot be considered outdated (even) if the interval (between them) is three to four months, since the process of planning a project itself takes a long time … changes in the industry do not take place overnight,” he said.

The Property Market Reports are produced and released by the National Property Information Centre (Napic), an agency of VPSD.

According to Mani, developers should use the quarterly reports as a guide to plan their projects, since they provide detailed statistics about property performance in terms of locations, type and pricing.

“(Developers) should not expect Napic to interpret the data for them. Instead, they should take the initiative to analyse the data themselves to prevent problems such as overhang from occurring,” he said.

However, Mani pointed out that key “decision makers” such as municipal councils have displayed a lack of interest in using Napic’s reports and this could lead to “unwise decisions” being made at their town planning level.

The Housing and Local Government Ministry, he said, should also publish a yearly report on property development based on the Form 7F that all developers are required to submit to the ministry twice yearly in June and December.

Form 7F is a progress status report of housing development projects.

“If the ministry can publish that report, some of the problems faced by the industry, such as oversupply, undersupply and abandoned housing, may be minimised,” Mani said.

“The data can guide developers in their project planning for specific areas, and house buyers can also use it as a guide to buy properties.”

- Property Times 18 March 2006 issue -