Maybank's Farid says loan rejection rate for affordable housing only 20%


Maybank group president and CEO Datuk Abdul Farid Alias said the overall rejection rate for housing loans in Malaysia last year was only 20.39%

Maybank has denied claims that the loan rejection rate for affordable housing in Malaysia was over 50%.

Quoting figures from the Association of Banks Malaysia (ABM), group president and CEO Datuk Abdul Farid Alias said the overall rejection rate for housing loans in Malaysia last year was only 20.39%.

"The total number of applications for housing loans to all banks in Malaysia was 456,000 and of this number, 93,000 applications were rejected," he said.

For loans where principal amount borrowed was less than RM500,000, he said, the rejection rate was 19%.

Loans between RM500,000 and RM1mil saw a 20.71% rejection rate, between RM1mil and RM3mil saw 25% loans rejected, and those over RM3mil saw 36% turned down.
He added that between January and February this year, the overall loan rejections were at 20.6%.

The reasons for these rejections, he said were mainly due to applications that exceed the applicant's debt service ratio, failure in the Central Credit Reference Information System (CCRIS) assesment and insufficient income among others.

CCRIS is used by banks as part of their assessment of borrowers' creditworthiness.

Abdul Farid said Maybank itself had seen its mortgage segment grow by 13% in 2015 compared to the previous year.

The Real Estate and Housing Developers Association (Rehda) had recently been reported as saying that the rejection rate for affordable housing loan applications was above 50%, and that these strict lending rules had hurt the property market and denied many first time housebuyers a chance to purchase a home.

The group said a survey had found that loan rejection was the biggest obstacle for developers in the second half of 2015.

Abdul Farid told reporters on Thursday that the trend in loan rejection had not seen any significant changes since 2014.

However, he said rejections may see a slight increase this year due to the current market conditions - The Star