At present property valuation institutions are playing a minimal role in the real estate market and buyers, especially foreign investors, cannot get the information they want when they are making decisions, according to Truong Thai Son, a member of the Standing Committee of the Vietnam Valuation Association.
He revealed that five different organisations give ten different prices and even although his association has 200 members much work is needed to bring the sector up to scratch.
Pham Van Binh from the Finance Academy said that the valuation institutions have still not become fully active. In theory, when property prices are pushed up to abnormally high levels, these institutions provide information about the actual value of properties and give reliable price forecasts, he said.
But in practice speculators have deliberately pushed prices up, but the valuation firms have not challenged this or issued any warnings to which people can refer to when making investment decisions.
However, the chief problem lies in the fact that there are contradictions in property appraisals in Vietnam and what most hinders property valuation institutions from assuming their proper role in the market is the lack of transparency.
Binh explained that the main difficulty is that valuators don’t have access to key information such as legal status, land programming and financial duties as this kind of information is only available to government agencies and large corporations.
Indeed in last year’s Real Estate Transparency Index released by Jones Lang LaSalle, an international real estate service group, Vietnam was in the lowest group for transparency.
A spokesman for the government admitted that reform is needed. He said people did not use the valuation firms because of a lack of confidence in the sector. He said officials were looking at introducing better training and qualifications as this would lead to increased public confidence.
