Nope, definitely not in Malaysia. It’s £2,000 per month in London. Here’s that report in homeandproperty.co.uk I know, suddenly everyone wants to tell me that I should compare apple to apple. Londoners are earning £, so surely they have no issues in paying for the £2,000. Noted. The average salary for people working in London as at 2017 is £39,476 PER YEAR. Do refer here to read full details if needed. Well, on a monthly basis, this is £3,289. In other words, if they did not share the rental with anyone else, the rental would take away 61 percent of their monthly salary. This will leave them £1,289 which if divided into daily would be around £43. Well, after using the remaining for food, car and perhaps some Happy Hours, there’s hardly much left for savings which will enable them to buy a property in London in the future. The average home price in London? £430,749. Here’s that report.
Sorry, the above is not to tell you about how bad Londoners are complaining about house prices there. It is to tell you that the housing affordability issue that we have here in Malaysia is actually a common issue everywhere. This is why we need to focus on solutions and perhaps learn from all these advanced property markets about what went wrong. We will definitely take a look at some other advanced property markets in the near future too. Advice to the working professionals in London? It pays to share the rental cost instead so that whatever saved can then go into owning a future home and start to hedge against even harder times moving forward. The reason? We can ask owners to reduce rental and they will ask you why. The government is also helping by providing temporary homes to the needy. The expenditure on temporary housing has risen through the roof. Within 4 years, the costs rose from £460m to £690m. Here’s that full report in bbc.co.uk. This is not enough and if we read the article, we would know why.
For the needy here in Malaysia, we have the Projek Perumahan Rakyat (PPR) which could be improved. However, there are plans for build more units and larger sized ones too. As for the rest, a total of 10 million homes are being planned within the next 10 years too. Majority of these are likely to be within the below RM400,000 category. Typical monthly mortgage for such units would be around RM2,000. The median income for a M40 household is around RM6,275 which should be enough for them to get a RM300,000 unit for example. Well, as long as they do not have huge credit card debts anyway. Hopefully, more visibility for these affordable homes will be announced soon by the Housing Minister yeah. In fact, a centralised federal agency modelled along the lines of Housing Development Board (HDB) of Singapore will be a plus point. At this moment, the only reason for such a high number of unsold unit is simply because there was no such centralised coordination in the first place. We cannot build first and hope people will buy. Happy following.
written on 2 Aug 2018
Next suggested article: Slightly up. Recovery in property market Malaysia?
