Nova City residents worried over ownership

The Nova City residents are meeting this evening and the main issue will be the lack of owner’s title certificates, four years after the Taipa residential project opened.

The almost 2,000 Nova City residents are “afraid about their ownership rights” because after four years none of them has received a title certificate, representative Caruso Fong told Macau Daily Times (MDT). The owners are meeting this evening and hiring a lawyer to follow up on the case is one of the possibilities on the table.
The first residents moved into Nova City in 2006 but so far none of owner’s title certificates have been issued. “That means we are not the legal owners of our apartments at all, we only entered sales contracts with the developer,” Nova City Owners’ Association chairman Chou On Sek said.
According to the Macau law, he added, there is no specific time limit for developer Nova Taipa Urbanizações, part of the Shun Tak Holdings group, to issue the title certificates. In the meantime, “we are not even considered ‘owners’ of our property so therefore we cannot officially form our own association,” Chou bemoaned.
The Taipa development residents feel like they have “no protection,” association secretary Caruso Fong explained. On August 10, the Housing Bureau hosted a meeting between the owners’ representatives and the developer, but “no information was given,” he said.
“The latest information from the property management company is that it will take at least two more years,” Chou On Sek stressed. “We have tried to get in contact with them for more than a year now but all they say is that it’s an ongoing process,” Caruso Fong added.
The property registration of all three phases of Nova City is “being processed by the Macau Government,” a Shun Tak spokesperson told MDT. “We were advised that expected completion is scheduled for end of 2010.” The developer also assured it “has always remained in constant communication with individual owners”. Shun Tak “has not received separate meeting requests of such nature lately”.

‘Tens of millions of dollars’

The residents association is also worried about the lack for audit reports for the last two years of Nova City’s management. Shun Tak said the 2008 report “has recently been completed.  In response to owners’ request, a new auditor has been appointed to handle the audit for year 2009 and is currently under preparation.”
According to Chou On Sek, all residents have paid two months of property management fee as well as a water and electricity deposit before moving in. But the developer “refuses to tell us where the deposit money is being kept,” he said.
Furthermore, the owners are paying a monthly management fee of HKD 0.8 per square feet, “which is already at above-average level in Taipa area,” the association chairman emphasised. A small part of that money, 10 percent, must be kept as a reserve fund but the residents also claim having no knowledge of this fund. “We are talking about tens of millions of [Hong Kong] dollars here,” Chou said.
“The funds are being kept intact as deposits in a dedicated account with one of the major banks in Macau,” Shun Tak stated.
A lawyer told MDT that to wait several years is actually a normal procedure for residential apartments buildings in the territory. “Almost all buildings have to go through the same route to fill horizontal property and there are more in a similar situation,” he explained.
However, the lawyer believes the only danger is “if the Government rejects the request,” which he believes to be very unlikely. On the other hand, the residents are quite protected against the possibility of the developer refusing to honour the sale contracts. “They can put forward a legal suit to make sure the contracts take into effect,” he said.