After only about two years of implementation, the Law on Housing 2023 has faced a significant amendment. The new draft has only 132 articles compared to 198 articles of the current Law. However, more notable than the reduction of 66 articles is the change in management methods: increasing decentralization, reducing pre-inspection, cutting procedures and expanding the right to self-determination of enterprises, localities and parties in transactions.
However, when rental housing is raised to a policy pillar, the problem is how much the State should intervene in the type of housing developed.
This change raises a larger question: when the layers of administrative controls are removed, how will the risks that were previously controlled by pre-audit be managed?
1. From home ownership to access to accommodation: rental housing becomes a new pillar
An important change of the Draft is to make "rental housing" one of the four types of housing in the policy structure, along with commercial housing, official-duty housing and policy housing. The Draft also determines that, in addition to housing for sale, the State prioritizes the development of rental housing and policy housing.
This is not merely the addition of a concept. This regulation shows that housing policy is expanding its focus: besides facilitating home ownership, access to accommodation through the rental market is more clearly positioned.
This orientation is even clearer when the Draft requires that the development of housing in urban areas is mainly carried out according to projects, prioritizing apartment buildings and orienting the development of mainly apartment buildings for rent in urban areas, areas developed under the TOD model, industrial parks, high-tech parks, export processing zones and densely populated places. According to data from the Ministry of Construction, by June 2026, the country will have about 60,900 houses in the statistically listed groups for rent, including social housing, workers' accommodation, student housing and old houses belonging to public assets[1]. However, when rental housing is raised to a policy pillar, the problem is how much the State should intervene in the type of housing developed.
Prioritizing condominiums in urban areas can help make land use more efficient and suitable for high population density. But infrastructure characteristics, construction density, land banks, and rental demand between areas in the same urban area can be very different.
Therefore, instead of only determining the type based on the classification of urban areas or administrative units, the law should consider establishing framework criteria such as planning, population density, land use coefficient, infrastructure capacity and housing demand. This not only maintains the orientation of urban development, but also allows the locality to have enough space to choose the appropriate model.
2. Mortgage on a house for rent: drop a procedure or reduce a layer of protection?
Article 182 of the Law on Housing 2023 currently stipulates that the owner is allowed to mortgage the house for lease but must notify the lessee in writing in advance of the mortgage, and at the same time notify the mortgagee that the house is being leased. In principle, the tenant may continue to lease until the end of the contract term, unless otherwise agreed by the parties.
Meanwhile, Clause 1, Article 126 of the Draft is designed more concisely in the direction that owners can mortgage houses, including houses for rent, in accordance with the law. This seemingly technical change actually poses a remarkable problem.
The current Housing Law provides tenants with a clear protection mechanism: they must be informed that the rented house becomes a collateral. If this obligation is no longer directly stipulated in the Housing Law, tenants will no longer have a specific mechanism under this law that obliges the owner to notify the rental property as collateral.
Therefore, the issue does not necessarily lie in whether a separate "notification procedure" should be maintained. It is important for the law to ensure that tenants are aware of legal changes that are likely to directly affect their right to use the home.
If the goal of the Draft is to streamline regulation and avoid repetition of civil law, it may not be necessary to keep the entire current Article 182 intact. But tenants' rights in the event of a mortgage, disposal of collateral, or transfer of ownership need to be defined clearly enough so that the simplification of the law does not simultaneously reduce the level of protection of tenants.
3. No compulsory discharge: from hard conditions to risk management by consensus
Another notable change appears in Article 126 of the Draft. In the direction of amendment, in some cases, if the capital contributor, the buyer or lease purchaser of the house and the mortgagee agree not to have to discharge the mortgage, or the buyer or lease purchaser agrees to become the mortgagee, the investor does not necessarily have to discharge the property before the transaction.
Notably, this approach does not only appear in the general regulations on mortgages. For social housing, the Draft also stipulates that mortgaged houses must be released before sale or lease purchase, unless the buyer, lease purchaser and mortgagee agree not to have to discharge the mortgage.
As such, this can be seen as a relatively consistent policy choice: moving from rigid legal conditions to allowing the parties to negotiate and allocate risks on their own.
This approach creates more flexibility for the investor, especially in raising capital and organizing sales. But flexibility is only really reasonable if the buyer, lessee or capital contributor agrees to be fully informed consent.
Buyers are often unlikely to self-assess the balance of secured obligations, the scope of collateral, the order of priority of payment, the conditions of discharge or the consequences if the developer breaches its obligations to the bank. Therefore, a signature confirming "agree not to discharge" does not necessarily prove that the buyer fully understands the risks he or she is taking.
The core legal issue is therefore no longer "whether the mortgage is mandatory or not", but what conditions the law needs to set so that the buyer's consent is really an informed consent.
The draft may continue to maintain the right to agreement but should require minimum disclosure of the mortgage status, the scope of secured obligations, the rights of the mortgagee, the conditions for discharge and the mechanism for releasing assets after the buyer or lessee fulfills the payment obligation.
4. Exceptions in investor selection: where should the transition mechanism stop?
[2] The transitional provisions of the Draft allow the handling of a number of social housing projects that have a legal basis before the new regulations take effect in the direction of being able to assign investors without having to re-carry out the entire selection process.
This approach has practical reasons. A project that has been approved for investment policy or has equivalent legal documents under the old legal framework if it has to go back from the beginning just because the law changes can incur additional time, costs and even create "suspended" projects due to the transition of the law.
However, it is necessary to distinguish this mechanism from the case where the investor of a commercial housing project adjusts its target to rental housing or fulfills its obligations on social housing. Being able to adjust the target and enjoy the corresponding policy does not mean that it is automatically exempt from the mechanism of selecting the investor. The point to be controlled here is the scope of the transitional exception.
Auctions, bidding or investor selection mechanisms are not only administrative procedures. In cases where the law requires them to be applied, they are also a tool to create competition and verify the capacity to implement the project. If the exception is too wide, the transition mechanism risks becoming an alternative to the principle of competition.
Therefore, the Draft should clearly define what level of legal maturity the project must reach before the effective date of the Law to enjoy the transitional mechanism; at the same time, stipulate the time limit and applicable conditions to ensure that the exception does not last indefinitely.
Source: Vietnam Lawyer Journal
5. Social housing prices: remove the pre-inspection but the post-inspection must be strong enough
One of the changes that has the most direct impact on buyers of social housing is the pricing mechanism.
The Law on Housing 2023 requires investors to develop a price plan and send it to a specialized agency of the provincial People's Committee for appraisal. The draft significantly changes this mechanism: the investor builds the price himself, hires a qualified consultant for verification and then approves the selling price and hire-purchase price by himself.
This is not a random change. In the dossier of assessment of administrative procedures, the Ministry of Construction clearly identifies one of the three procedures proposed to be abolished as the procedure for appraisal of social housing selling prices.
The benefits of the new approach are quite clear: businesses don't have to wait for an additional step of administrative due diligence before putting a product on the market. But the problem lies in the control structure after that.
The verification unit is selected and paid by the investor himself. Meanwhile, buyers of social housing are a group of policy beneficiaries, often have more limited access to information and negotiation. Therefore, if the pre-inspection is removed but the post-inspection is not strong enough, the risk does not disappear but is only transferred to a later stage.
The solution is not necessarily to establish a new mandatory procedure in place of the one that has just been abolished. That could run counter to the goal of reform.
It is more reasonable to build a risk-based post-inspection mechanism: requiring investors to keep full records of price formation; publicizing major price components; empowering management agencies to inspect when there are abnormal signs; stipulating the responsibilities of the verification organization; and at the same time forcibly adjusting or refunding the difference if the post-inspection determines that the price is calculated improperly.
Thus, the State does not need to approve each price before selling but still maintains the ability to inspect and intervene when the mechanism of self-determination, verification and approval of prices does not ensure compliance with the principles of statutory price determination.
6. Dual nationals: it's not a matter of "whether it's recognized or not"
Not only relaxing the method of project management and transactions, the Draft also seeks to clarify the legal status of entities participating in the housing market. A notable case is that Vietnamese citizens also have foreign nationality. Point dd, Clause 1, Article 10 of the Draft supplements the case of Vietnamese citizens who also have foreign nationality, residing inside or outside Vietnam, if they use Vietnamese nationality when buying, renting and purchasing houses in Vietnam, they are treated like Vietnamese citizens.
This is a practical addition. The main legal issue should not be whether Vietnamese law recognizes the status of a citizen who concurrently has another nationality. What needs to be clarified is in what capacity a person with multiple legal status will participate in a housing transaction in Vietnam.
The phrase "using Vietnamese nationality when transacting" therefore needs to be concretized. What documents does the trader have to present with a Vietnamese passport, identity card or other documents? Is this status determined at the time of signing the contract, notarization or registration of ownership? If the person has previously owned a house as a foreigner or an overseas Vietnamese, how will the transition to use Vietnamese citizenship affect the ownership term and registration data?
This is not a purely theoretical issue but is already a problem related to foreign organizations and individuals, Vietnamese who also have foreign nationality and overseas Vietnamese that need to be dealt with in this amendment to the law. Therefore, instead of just recognizing one more group of subjects, the Law or guiding document needs to establish a clear enough mechanism to determine the legal status used for transactions and the corresponding legal consequences.
The draft Housing Law shows a clear shift: reducing pre-checks, increasing decentralization and giving more autonomy to businesses and parties to transactions. This is a necessary reform direction, but flexibility only really makes sense if the layers of control that are removed are replaced with effective risk management mechanisms. That is perhaps the most important problem of this amendment: how to make the law open enough for the market to move but not let flexibility become a shift of risk to buyers and renters.
Lawyer Nguyen Van Phuc - Ngo Tuong Vi
HM&P Law Firm
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[1] https://moj.gov.vn/portal/tin-tuc/chi-tiet/ho-so-tham-inh-du-thao-luat-nha-o-sua-oi-tl4j2e5d8c.html, accessed on 2026/09/18.
[2] Article 132 of the Draft.
