KUALA LUMPUR, July 25 — The government is mulling the setting up of a regulatory body to supervise the housing industry, especially the affordable housing segment.

Second Finance Minister, Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani, said the body was important to solve the mismatch between demand and supply of affordable housing in the country.

"The definition of affordable house prices is different between a property developer and another.

"This is something the government is looking into in the near term. Some of the houses being built are not in the right locations where people need them the most and you have an issue of mismatch,” he said at Invest Malaysia Kuala Lumpur 2017 here today.

Johari, who was one of the panelists during a plenary session to discuss Malaysia’s fundamentals, also said the regulatory body may be necessary as there were too many complications involved in the development of affordable housing and there was also a need to re-look at the pricing of affordable housing segment.

"We need a regulatory body to manage this so that we didn’t build affordable housing and then people don’t buy,” he said.

He said a meeting would be held with the Urban Wellbeing, Housing and Local Government Ministry to develop a comprehensive regulatory body to address the issue of affordable houses.

Earlier, in his speech, Johari said the experiences in the past financial crisis had served the government well in navigating current operating economic landscape through proactive actions to mitigate the impact of a volatile financial market and declining oil-related revenues.

Ongoing efforts to diversify the economy towards more sustainable drivers of growth, underpinned by innovation and technology, will further boost the country’s resilience against shocks and contribute to the social well-being of the rakyat through higher wages, he said.

"Therefore, while the boom in global commodity landscape would benefit us positively, it is no panacea. Instead, policy pragmatism that engenders robust and inclusive economic prosperity should always be the cornerstone in determining the policy direction of our nation,” said Johari.

Speaking to reporters later, Johari said, eight companies had registered their interest to be the master developer of US$1.7 billion (RM7.3 billion) Bandar Malaysia project.

"I was informed by the Treasury Secretary-General, the board of  1Malaysia Development Bhd will sit down and go through the companies individually by end-July or early next month,” he said.

TRX City Sdn Bhd, wholly-owned by the Finance Ministry, had aborted the sale of a 60 per cent stake in Bandar Malaysia in May to IWH CREC Sdn Bhd on grounds that the latter had not met its payment obligations despite being given 12 extensions. — Bernama