The amended Law on Real Estate Business was passed by the National Assembly and will take effect from the beginning of 2025, regulating the deposit for future housing purchases.
Specifically, Article 17 of the amended Law on Real Estate Business stipulates that real estate project investors are not allowed to authorize other organizations or individuals to sign contracts for deposit, purchase, sale, transfer, or lease-purchase of houses in construction works, construction floor area in construction works, and land use rights with technical infrastructure in real estate projects.
At the same time, Clause 5, Article 23 of this Law also provides details on deposits and payments for future housing purchases. Real estate project investors are only allowed to collect deposits of no more than 5% of the selling or lease-purchase price from customers when the housing or construction works have met all conditions for being put into business.
Hanoi Time Tower apartment project, in Van Phu urban area (Ha Dong, Hanoi) has been abandoned for many years (Photo: Ha Phong).
According to experts, this deposit regulation has ended the long period of deposits being in the form of agreements. At the same time, the deposit regulation ensures the conclusion of the contract and protects the rights of home buyers.
Mr. Le Hoang Chau - Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association (HoREA) - said that real estate business has the special characteristics of deposit transactions. Meanwhile, the Law on Real Estate Business in 2006 and 2014 do not regulate deposits occurring before the time when the real estate project or housing is eligible to sign a contract or mobilize capital to sell future housing, especially land.
According to Mr. Chau, taking advantage of Clause 1, Article 328 of the 2015 Civil Code which does not stipulate the value and rate of deposits, speculators, land brokers, and dishonest businesses have received deposits of large value, in some cases up to 90-95% of the value of the property being traded. Speculators even set up "ghost projects" without legal basis for the purpose of fraud, causing huge losses to customers and disrupting social order, typically the fraud case that occurred at Alibaba Company.
The Usilk City project (Ha Dong, Hanoi) has been behind schedule for many years, causing the hopes of thousands of customers to settle down and make a living to "go up in smoke" (Photo: Ha Phong).
Sharing the same view, Chairman of the Vietnam Real Estate Brokers Association Nguyen Van Dinh said that the deposit not only shows the signing of the sales contract, but also serves the purpose of the investor determining the market demand and ensuring the output of the project product.
"The deposit regulations in the law are very reasonable, but according to the experience of developed countries, they use third parties such as banks and credit institutions to supervise and manage this amount of money with a joint account without "flowing" into the investor's pocket. If the investor does not fulfill the commitment, the customer can get the money back, and the bank will be responsible for this amount of money," Mr. Dinh emphasized.
According to Dan Tri reporters, in reality, there have been many housing projects that have collected deposits and progress payments from customers through brokerage firms, or directly from investors. However, the investors then did not implement the project or implemented it halfway and then stopped for decades, causing home buyers to fall into a "half-crying, half-laughing" situation.
The common point of these projects is that the investor has held the deposit and progress payment of customers up to hundreds of billions of dong, in which many people have to bear the burden of paying interest on bank loans to buy houses and paying monthly rent.
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