A new residential area in HCMC’s District 2. Apartment supplies in HCMC and Hanoi are estimated to fall this year - PHOTO: VNA

At the Vietnam Real Estate Summit 2019 (VRES 2019), held on December 12, Nguyen Quoc Anh, deputy general director of Batdongsan.com.vn, said the property market will face multiple challenges next year due to tighter control being applied to new projects and the increase in risk coeficient for real estate loans.

The demand for real estate products remains high, but the market has witnessed a decline since the previous quarter, Anh added.

In the 2020-2022 period, the number of apartments available for sale in HCMC and Hanoi will have difficulty reaching figures seen in the 2017-2018 period.

Batdongsan.com.vn forecast that 2020 will be the hardest year for the local property market since 2015, especially for the condotel segment, due to tighter controls over property loans, the lack of new supplies and investors’ low confidence in the condotel segment.

Anh remarked that the condotel segment will be less attractive than other products, such as apartments, villas, shophouses and land lots.

Investors are still keen on the land segment. In Phu Quoc District of the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang, for example, after the news that Phu Quoc will be developed into a city broke, the number of searches for land lots in the district surged from 10,000 in January to 30,000 in April this year.

Similarly, the news that Dong Anh District in Hanoi will be turned into an urban district from a rural status has driven up the number of searches for land in the district from 90,000 in January to 150,000 in April.

Therefore, the land segment and the property market as a whole are still attractive investment channels as they provide higher profits than other investment models. The prices of houses in HCMC grow by 12% annually, while the average deposit rate at banks is 8% and the VN-Index rises 9% per year.

At the VRES 2019, Phung Van Nang, a senior consultant for the board of Hung Loc Phat Corporation, proposed solutions for the property market, including developing a night-time economy model, which will have a great impact on the tourism real estate segment and fully exploit the potential of the market.

However, unreasonable policies and poor infrastructure are hindrances to the development of this model in Vietnam. SGT