Real estate loans accounted for 51.72 per cent of Cambodia’s total personal loan balance of $10.39 billion as of March 31. Hong Menea
VTRUST Appraisal Co Ltd and Credit Bureau (Cambodia) Co Ltd (CBC) have teamed up to provide first-of-a-kind digital real estate appraisal services to Kingdom’s financial institutions (FI).
The two firms virtually penned a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to integrate the Indication Plus platform of value indication reports produced by VTrust with CBC’s credit assessment tool.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, VTrust chairman Vong Sokhal said the partnership will increase the efficiency of financial operations across the board, and promote the use of comprehensive real estate appraisal services among FIs.
VTrust can prepare brief real estate appraisal reports in a fully automatic fashion through a system formulated by experts, in line with international real estate valuation standards, he said.
Users can additionally check the progress of the evaluation process from the time the request is submitted until a final summary report is generated, he said.
“Through the Indication Plus platform, you can access and request [real estate appraisal] anytime – easily, quickly and with a high degree of confidence – and know the value of real estate anywhere in the country. Everything is in your hands.
“You can log in from the head office to see all the requests of the team working with all of your branches and institutions completely and immediately, easily and quickly through the Indication Plus platform, which stores a wide range of data and has nationwide scope,” Sokhal said.
CBC CEO Oeur Sothearoath said real estate is a very important part of credit appraisal and CBC’s main focus is on how to provide credit assessments that enable users to use data more effectively.
“Looking at the total loan portfolio in the financial sector, we see that more than 50 per cent of the loans issued on the market are collateralised loans. Of that, most collateral is land or housing. There are about 150,000 to 200,000 of these transactions per month,” he said.
As a real estate veteran serving the community since 2004, VTrust was a perfect fit, he said, lauding its digital foundation as a “smart solution” that could revolutionise and optimise how real estate appraisals are used in the market.
“We are both very proficient in finding opportunities to work with each other, given our mutually complementary solutions that can add value to the financial sector as a whole.
“Today’s memorandum is a testament to our collaboration, and I believe it demonstrates our close cooperation,” he said. “We’ll be able to find a common business model that can be more effective in the field of finance.”
CBC’s first quarter 2021 report shows that as of the end of March, real estate loans accounted for 51.72 per cent of Cambodia’s total personal loan balance of $10.39 billion.
Capital investment in the Kingdom’s construction sector in the first nine months of 2020 fell 9.6 per cent to $5.868 billion from the $6.494 billion recorded in January-September 2019, the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction reported.
