No compromise on quality
The Star 12/10/2006

I REFER to your report, “Housing laws need review” (StarBiz, Oct 9).

While I agree that housing laws and regulations need to be reviewed, I feel the laws should actually be tightened to get rid of the loopholes and create more accountability and to achieve developed nation quality of construction.

It is an open secret that almost every house built in Malaysia requires immediate renovations upon taking physical possession.

This is mainly due to the poor and shoddy workmanship of most developers in the country.

The Real Estate and Housing Developers Association of Malaysia (Rehda) should look at ways to get its members to stop dishing out sub-standard homes to buyers and start looking at ways to improve the quality of homes.

Just giving a warranty of a year or so is not simply workable as, in most cases, the time taken to respond and repair is so long that this one year passes by swiftly.

And, the repair work is usually also shoddy.

The basic infrastructure and finishing is so bad that not much can be achieved through repair work.

Imagine, if all the walls (which is not uncommon) had poor plastering, do you think that the developer is going to rip off all the plastering and do it again?

In real life this does not happen and mostly the buyers have to compromise, as otherwise nothing gets done and the warranty period moves on swiftly.

But then there is the argument that we can go to the tribunal or courts.

When the practice of shoddy workmanship is so common, the answer is not for every house buyer to approach the tribunal or courts.

If everyone does this then we have a choked system and you will see little, if any, in terms of results.

The answer is to get errant developers to be made more accountable.

The solution is, of course, the build-and-sell concept, but this will not help if it is an option. Like all things in life that are bitter in taste, it must be made mandatory for it to work.

SILVER LINING,
Penang.