Background of the news Property Laws in Myanmar

According to The Nations website, many experts recently said that

Myanmar real estate market would become more buoyant if regulations
on pricing and related issues were to be strengthened.
Developers and bankers urged the government to improve
infrastructure and regulatory reforms.
Tony Piccon, managing director of Colliers International Myanmar,
said the country needed to control property prices and concentrate on
affordable housing. He brought up the price comparison of the apartments
between in Thailand and Myanmar; that the apartment worth US$ 30,000
or THB 1 million in Thailand covers around 30 square meters, but the
same price in Myanmar which covers only around 15 square meters.
Piccon also urged the government to put more weight on affordable
housing for salaried workers.
Developers should consider affordability for low-end market for
office workers to secure the housing, while underscoring the importance of
location for affordable housing. Currently, most of affordable housing is
located far from the city center, where many company offices are located.
Transportation is one of the most serious issues for these office workers.
Imagine if you do not have a car, how do you get to the bus stop to get on
a nasty horrible bus? Sitting for a couple hours waiting at the back of the
traffic on the way to your office. That makes a huge difference in whether
people want to live there or not.
Piccon also added that Myanmars parking space regulations were
really hurting the condominium market, which condominiums must have
1.2 parking lots per unit. He thought that was crazy. Every other country
and city in Southeast Asia has completely different parking restriction.
They allow smaller unit sizes to be developed. Here, in Myanmar, it is
obvious that the parking space is a problem with 1.2 lots per unit, as that
means it is very hard to make a project feasible with the smaller unites.
In Piccos opinion, Myanmar should find the way to ensure that office
workers have access to finance so that they can buy their own property.
He even repeated that Myanmar needs to deal with outside of the
financial area. They have a great banking system, but what is missing
here is the property regulations for access to finance. Moreover, he
added that in Thailand, low-cost housing usually started at around
$30,000 per unit, but salaried workers who earn $500 to $1,000 a month
could get a bank loans. But what happens in Myanmar is that several
commercial banks are still unwilling to lend individual buyers for fear of
losing money, as the property they want to purchase is still not counted as
collateral.
However, a credit bureau is being planned, where commercial banks
can check individual borrowers financial status. Kim Chaw Su, chief
financial officer of KBZ Group, welcomed the government moves
according to establishing a credit bureau. But she also had mentioned
about the problem about the credit bureau that "If we are having a credit
bureau, we need to make sure that we have the right type of criteria that
will connect from every single agency or bank, to make sure that we have
a pool that we share. I think there will be some concerns about having the

right kind of information. How do we make sure whether that information

is actually accurate?" Kim Chaw Su also underscored the need for more
regulatory reforms. She commented that many regulations were pretty old
and only some that had been recently updated.
Taxation is also important to banks, so that they can extend more
loan, she suggested. Hal Bosher, chief executive of Yoma Bank, said
Myanmar needed to address structural issues very urgently. In his view, it
is important to have very developed mortgage Machanisms, while it is
necessary to reform the interest-rate structure. He added that land,
access to land, and the quality of land titles were all extremely important
in regard to securing credit.
With high expectation on the new government, Azeem Azimuddin,
chief executive financial officer of Aya Bank, said project finance and
residential loads would be crucial to improve the quality of life for people
in Myanmar.

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