21.
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In April last year, the sub-committee, which includes among its members lawyers, architects and others with relevant expertise, issued a Consultative Document, containing its interim recommendations for public consultation.
The report issued today contains the Commission's final recommendations on the subject and reflects the comments made in response to the Consultative Document. Professor Roebuck said the report endeavoured to balance the views of conflicting interests, while achieving its objective of enhanced consumer protection.
While the Law Reform Commission report covers only uncompleted residential property in Hong Kong, Professor Roebuck said public comments on the Consultative Document indicated strong support for regulation of the sales descriptions of overseas uncompleted residential properties sold or advertised in Hong Kong.
In response to this concern, the sub-committee has already commenced an examination of the sales descriptions of overseas uncompleted residential property and the Commission will publish a separate report on this in due course.
The main recommendations in the report are:
The term gross floor area in sales literature should be standardised by legislation. The definition in regulation 23(3) of the Building (Planning) Regulations (Cap 123), which is used by the Building Authority in approving building plans, should be adopted generally.
The inclusion of saleable area in sales literature should be made mandatory by legislation.
The definition of saleable area in Legal Advisory and Conveyancing Office Circular Memorandum No. 1 dated June 23, 1993 should be recognised in legislation as the standard method to describe saleable area. in all sales literature.
The sales brochure should contain floor plans with specified details such as the external dimensions of individual units, the orientation, location of ingress and egress points, load bearing walls, exposed pipes, etc.
There should be a list of specified fittings and finishes in all sales brochures. The brands and countries of origin of the fittings and finishes should be stated.
The sales brochure should state the construction completion date, the expected date of legal completion, and the expected date of vacant possession.