Amended guide for buyers
INDUSTRY guidelines amended to help tenants and buyers from being cheated on the floor area of a property will be made available to the public within the next few weeks.
The Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors will publish amendments to its guidelines on how the saleable area of a property should be measured.
A bilingual brochure is being released to help vendors and buyers assess the size of a property according to a standardised method of measurement.
The Institute of Hong Kong Surveyors' original guidelines, Saleable Area, was published in 1985, jointly with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Consumer Council.
Amendments would be based on guidelines laid down in the Government's Consent Scheme, introduced last July for residential pre-sales.
The institute's original guidelines state that the saleable area should be measured from the exterior of the enclosing walls of a unit and from the middle of the party walls between two units.
This area should include the internal partitions and columns within the unit but not the common parts of a building, such as lift shafts.
But the measurements for attachments such as cocklofts, bay windows, gardens, yards, terraces, flat roofs and car ports should be quoted separately, the guidelines state.
Stephen Yip, the chairman of the Institute of Hong kong Surveyors, General Practice Division, said new guidelines would ''highlight the Government's definitions used in the Consent Scheme''.
The Consent Scheme covers uncompleted private residential developments on land sold by the government to the private sector.
It requires developers to use a standard form of sales agreement that uses one definition of ''saleable area''.
