Factors influencing home ownership among public servants in Penang

Abstract

Housing is a basic human need as explained in the Maslow hierarchy needs. Having a house is a very important entity in ensuring a sense of security for each individual and a family. House is also a symbol of achievement and social acceptance of an individual in a society. Deciding to own a house is a crucial decision since housing expenses involved a large amount of cost in individual monthly expenses. Nearly 60% or 960,000 public servants were unable to own a house based on CUEPECS in year 2019. Furthermore, the home ownership rate in Malaysia as reported by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) in 2019 didn’t increase significantly compared to 2016. The increment of home ownership in Malaysia was only 0.6% from 2016 to 2019. Thus, the government and house developers need to identify the important factors that influence the house buying decision-making to increase the home ownership rate in Malaysia. This study identifies the important factors that influence home ownership among public servants in Penang. This study measures the internal factors and external factors influencing home ownership decisions. The internal factors measure the income, stage of life-cycle, employment and education subfactors. The external factors measure the financial and economic condition, house price, location, neighbourhood, house type and design and also government housing incentives. A mixed-method was applied in this study by interviewing real estate experts and also a survey to 392 respondents in the case study area. Using transcribe method and analysing the survey data with descriptive and inferential analyses to study the influencing factors. In this investigation, every internal and external factors influencing a person's decision to buy a home was examined on the group of people with all income levels. The results of the study showed that respondents from public servants in Penang really depending on the government housing incentives to own a house which is parallel with the demographic background of our respondents which are majorities are from lower income. The real estate expert and respondents agreed all of the factors were influencing house buying decisions except for education. It is important to identify and evaluate which incentives that is the most significant and strengthen the incentives to increase the home ownership rate among public servants in Malaysia.