萬國法律事務所

The Consumer Protection Commission recently completed the revision of the model contracts for pre-sale housing transactions and the relevant regulations which aims at providing greater security for consumers. The revision requires the housing developers to clearly list the individual percentages and prices of the actual floor space, additional facilities and common area. The revision also decreases the management fees for renewing agreements from 1% to 0.1% so as to reduce the risk of consumer in purchasing pre-sale housing.

The Commission has reported that disputes in pre-sale housing have been on a rise lately, especially where accusations have been made against housing developers for padding the floor areas of pre-sale apartments by adding common areas to the total size of the units being sold. Hence, the revised model contract is aimed to tackle the above problem and, concurrently, to enforce more transparency in pre-sale housing transactions. With the new model contracts and relevant regulations, the developer is required to list the actual size and price the consumers are paying for common areas and other additional structures. This will assist the consumers to ascertain the actual content of the units purchased and prevent the housing developer from misrepresenting the actually size of the living space in each unit.