‘Price of house will drop with SST’

Yong (left) looking at some of the projects on display at a property exhibition in Perak. — Filepic

WITH the reintroduction of the Sales and Service Tax (SST) to replace the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the state is confident in lowering overall house prices.

State housing committee chairman Paul Yong Choo Kiong said it was because SST was only applied in the earlier stages and did not involve a lot of transactions.

He said he did not want people to misconstrue that SST was more troublesome than GST.

“In terms of housing prices, SST will only be charged once when industrial players sell to distributors,” he said after opening the Perak State Housing Policy Workshop 2018 in Ipoh.

“House prices will be cheaper, construction costs will decrease and contractors’ charges will be lower, and we will see the difference with the launch of a new housing project,” he added.

Yong was commenting on a recent statement by Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng on the abolition of GST and the exemption of SST for construction services and building materials, which was expected to ease the pressure on prices of houses as well as industrial and commercial buildings.

Lim said the Federal Government expected construction costs to be much lower following the SST exemption on raw materials such as cement, sand and iron.

At the two-day workshop, Yong said it aimed to improve and solve housing problems in line with the National Housing Policy 2.0. — Bernama