Property management and maintenance for high-rise apartments in Penang have since been an irresolvable problem like nightmare haunting the Penangites for decades! This is mainly due to no better choice of buying landed properties with the hardly affordable escalating high costs and scarcity in supply, they have to endure the torture of living in such a sub-standard living environment!
With most high-rise buildings and apartments were built in shoddy materials and workmanship, which were made not to last for long term, as good only after the defects liability periods, after the developers had freed from any encumbrance and had their stakeholder funds cashed out from the bankers, which was the time the lifts were going to give trouble and breakdowns, the RC floors, ceilings were about to crack and invite leakage to visit the wet areas in the parcels! Even the longest lasting ones, such problems may have occurred at best after less than a handful of 5 years! Problems are not ending, remedy is continuing to be helpless, most property managing agents are unable to perform their duties professionally and diligently to meet the requirements of the so-called Councils of the Management Corporation duly appointed under the Strata Titles Act 318, which is the only bible in hands apart from the many Acts we do have in the books but lacked in operation! Why the deadlock of these chronic problems and how would they have been caused? Simply, based on my personal observation and judgment - there have been too many Acts (laws), too little professionalism to implement them effectively, is the main core of the problems!
Far back to 1997, when the then ADO of PTG Mr Wong Hin Fatt, the one officer who had been considered one of the most experienced and having long service in Land Office, I had been holding rounds of discussion with him concerning the issues of - the relevance in managing high-rise buildings, in relation to the common properties, pertaining to consents of by-laws - the Strata Titles Act 318, 1985, its efficiency and powers of implementation, and by whom?! How would PTG or the Land Administrator play their parts in co-ordination with the several Management Corporations then had been established and continue mushrooming?! What was the code and ethic or set of rules, guide lines delineated by the Authority to effectively help to implement the Strata Titles Acts as well as standing as the watchdog, by PTG, to govern and monitor the activities and performances of the numerous MCs having established, having entrusted with the public funds?!
No result of resolution from the unofficial meetings with Mr Wong thus far until he retired from office in year 2004! Problems remain problems and worsening! Almost 90% of the medium costs or LMCs are badly managed and faced with scores of maintenance problems, money not enough, by either short changed or being abused, some so-called professional property managers are also making use of the opportunity to spare benefits from the loopholes of Laws at the ignorance of the unprofessional Management Corporation Councils and at the expense of the residents, whom they have contributed in subsidizing the management funds for proper maintenance of the common properties covenanted in the S&P (House Rules and Regulations), the mutual obligation of the Management Corporation vs the residents (the parcel proprietors). Sadly, things are not done appropriately to the essence of law (Act 318)! With due respect to the Authority, though they are not solely to be blamed, the residents are also part of the roots of the bad causes, we being the apartment dwellers have our rights to appeal for the intervene of the CAT Government to buck up now and look into ways and means of curbing the problems, to address the grievances of the apartment public those days had been neglected or incapacitated, by the former defunct State Government!
I wish to share with the peers of apartment dwellers some of the findings I had two weeks ago, when I was in Singapore, I visited a housing estate which consists of clusters of high-rise apartments, which were said to be more than 20 years old at Chou Chu Kang area. The whole area was so well managed that you will never believe that the buildings were as old as more than two decades! The attachment picture is self-explanatory of its perfectness and the great difference of what Singaporean can do and what we Penangites couldn't do! I also visited the website of the Town Council for that particular area and do have some little inspiration to how we can possibly emulate from the evolutionary prototype of Singaporean ways of property management. It needs a text to ensemble fully the concept of effectiveness and my sole intention here is to serve this article as a clarion call to the apartment dwellers and the State Administration to take things serious, this is the time to buck up and to resolve problems which have been haunting the peoples of Penang for decades.
The nonchalant attitude of the State Government will not only cause the property values of all apartments to derogate, due to the deteriorating conditions of the building outlooks, it inevitably will cause Penang, the Pearl of the Orient, to pose a lousy image to the tourists that we are like a war torn city, with so many poorly maintained concrete forests, weather-worn buildings, dilapidated facades are all symbolic of a third world developing Country’s!
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