KUALA LUMPUR: National mortgage corporation Cagamas Bhd is working towards introducing a shared equity programme for housing, said president and chief executive officer Datuk Chung Chee Leong.
He said Cagamas was currently looking at how to replicate similar programmes that had been implemented in the United Kingdom and Australia to fit the Malaysian housing scenario.
“We hope we can get the blueprint ready by end of this year,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a Cagamas and World Bank Group conference on affordable housing here yesterday. Yesterday was the first day of the two-day conference titled Constructing and Financing Affordable Housing Across Asia.
Housing and Local Government Minister Zuraida Kamaruddin said under the programme that had been proposed to her ministry, Cagamas would provide a 20 per cent deposit from the buyer’s side while the remaining 80 per cent is provided by the bank.
Under this proposed scheme, there will also be an alternative financing whereby Cagamas will help to guarantee up to 100 per cent of the house price.
“We hope this proposed scheme can really help the bottom 40 per cent (B40) group who was not able to obtain financial assistance from various financial institutions previously,” she said.
On another matter, Zuraida said to complement the rent-to-own scheme that was currently in place, the ministry was looking for investors, including foreigners, who were interested to become financiers to pay for a lease period of three to five years.
The investors are absentee investors during the construction period of three to three-and-a-half years. “From here, these financiers will park their money into Cagamas first before being distributed,” she said.
Among parties that have shown interest so far were from South Korea, the Middle East countries, as well as China.
She added that she would be accompanying Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad to Beijing, China, this month and was looking forward to signing several memoranda of understanding with Chinese’s financing agencies. –Bernama
