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Property brokers face lawsuits for false pricing
Many developers are threatening to take legal action against real estate consultancy firms for releasing ‘incorrect information’ about property prices, according to a local newspaper.
The Nguoi Lao Dong daily said that Daewon-Hoan Cau Housing Development Joint Stock Company, Phu My Hung Joint Stock Company and Kien A Company are furious after the consultancy firms, including CB Richard Ellis Viet Nam (CBRE) and Vinaland Invest Corp. (Vinaland), released wrong information about the prices of projects they have invested in.
According to a CBRE report, the prices of apartment projects in HCM City have decreased by between 30 per cent and 52 per cent compared to last November.
It has also reported that the price of Cantavil Hoan Cau apartments in Binh Thanh District, which is invested by Daewon-Hoan Cau, has gone down to US$2,600 per square metre from its benchmark of $3,700, a decrease of 29 per cent.
‘Does not fit’
However, Nguyen Huu Nhi, head of Daewon-Hoan Cau legal department, says that CBRE’s reported information does not fit with the company’s data.
Nhi says that CBRE has the right to release its research results, but it must be accurate.
CBRE has to prove that the information it has provided is accurate, or it has to correct the information on mass media and offer apologise, otherwise his company will file a lawsuit, he adds.
Truong Quoc Hung, marketing director of Phu My Hung Joint Stock Company, the developer of My Phuc high-end apartment project in District 7, also says that there are big differences between CBRE’s released prices and the real prices.
A square metre of My Phuc apartments is priced at at least $1,500 but CBRE reports it at $872. According to the Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper, Jeremy King, deputy director of CBRE’s valuation and consultancy services section on December 15 said that CBRE will check all involved information and will have a meeting with developers to discuss the issue.
In the meantime, Kien A Company, developer of Blooming Park High-end Apartment Project in District 2 has also questioned the research results on the property market conducted by Vinaland.
Incorrect
According to Vinaland, since late November to early December, the prices of a penthouse at the Blooming Park project dropped by 6.1 per cent, or VND2 million per square metre. However, Cao Thanh Hoang, head of the Kien A’s planning department, said the information was incorrect.
"Vinaland has to check the released information and prove that the price has decreased by VND2 million per square metre. If a mistake is found and Vinaland does not correct the information, Kien A would send documents to its lawyers office for further proceedings," Hoang said.
Tran Minh Hoang, chairman of Vinaland Invest Corp, had asked his staff to check their information and admitted that a mistake had been made in the process of entering data.
However, Hoang said that such mistakes happened when employees had to deal with thousands of real estate projects and were not wilfully made.
CBRE yesterday still made no comments about the information it released.
VNS
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