Monday, September 10, 2012

Bill to guarantee strata title

PUTRAJAYA: The Government will table amendments to the Strata Titles Act, aimed at reducing the waiting time for housebuyers to move into their new homes.

The National Land Council (MTN) approved a proposal to table the Strata Titles (Amendment) 2012 Bill in the next Parliament meeting, which would also look at issuing strata titles and vacant possession simultaneously.

This means that buyers of stratified housing can move in after receiving vacant possession from the developer and at the same time strata ownership would have been registered with the land office for the purpose of transfer of title to the buyers.

In a statement, the council said that through this new mechanism, the time needed to process and issue strata titles to individual house owners would be reduced from 170 working days to less than 100 days.

“The proposed amendments to the Act would, among others, aim to ensure the rights of buyers of stratified housing, especially strata titles that guarantee proprietary (keempunyaan) rights to an individual,” the council said in a statement after a meeting chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin here.

The council noted that the amendments would ensure that developers carry out their responsibilities in applying for the strata titles and transferring ownership rights to the buyers.

Meanwhile, the council revealed that all but one state in peninsular Malaysia achieved a 100% success rate in settling backlogged applications related to land as at Dec 31 last year, with only Selangor missing out on 164 of a total of 1,965,867 cases.

This, however, was just a fraction of the 7,001,735 cases that were closed overall across Peninsula Malaysia.

Seven states also managed to achieve a 100% record in handling one-day land ownership transfer registration as at June this year, accounting for 12,970 applications across Perak, Pahang, Perlis, Terengganu, Kuala Lumpur, Negri Sembilan and Malacca.