KUALA LUMPUR (Oct): Datuk Seri FD Iskandar, president of the Real Estate and Housing Developers Association, said he was in talks with the government to recommend for houses priced RM500,000 and below to be zero-rated under the Goods and Services Tax to be introduced next April.

“I have written a letter to the Prime Minister regarding this, and am in talks with Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan, the Minister of Urban Wellbeing, Housing and Local Government,” he told reporters after Glomac Bhd’s annual general meeting today.

FD Iskandar is group managing director and CEO of Glomac.

He said the minister had recommended that the move should be for first-time homeowners only, while FD Iskandar said it would be more suitable to have it for all buyers of affordable homes.

“It would be hard to implement a system for first-time buyers only. No taxation system in the world would be able to do that,” he said.

On the recent Budget 2015 announcement, he said that he was “happy” that the government had introduced a few measures to assist first-time homeowners, such as the Youth Housing Scheme.

Under the Youth Housing Scheme, the government will provide monthly financial assistance of RM200 to homeowners for the first two years after the purchase of a house, and those under the scheme will get a 50% stamp duty exemption and a 10% loan guarantee from the government.

“We hope that the financial institutions will also step in to help the first-time house buyers of houses below RM500,000,” he said.