HCMC – Tackling condo inventories predicted to take three years
06-01-2013Monitoring the market’s moves in the last quarter of 2012, CB Richard Ellis Vietnam (CBRE) noticed 28,000 apartments in HCMC had not found buyers.
Marc Townsend, managing director of CBRE, said property enterprises would only be able to sell out the current unsold volume in the next two to three years if they cut prices further. With unsold condos fixed at lower prices, homebuyers will get more confident or they will have greater chance of gaining easier access to home loans then.
According to Townsend, tax adjustment will have little impact on the market and he doesn’t even believe that project owners would shift from a series of high-class home projects to low-cost ones as quickly as expected.
Prices and confidence are the decisive factors for the apartment market, he said, adding a lot of people will be ready to buy homes at reasonable prices as they prefer living in their own homes.
The local demand for affordable condos valued at between VND10 million and VND14 million a square meter has still remained huge, especially for those in the city’s outlying districts like Go Vap, Binh Tan, Nha Be, 9 and Thu Duc.
The year 2012 saw several developers gaining positive sales results when marketing condo projects with moderate areas at the price ranging from VND600 million to VND1 billion each.
For instance, about 75% of a total of 333 flats of the Ehome 3 project in Binh Tan District have been sold after less than five months of being put up for sale.
One of the early birds in 2013 is the Metro Apartment project in District 2’s An Phu-An Khanh area that has just been offered, with prices expected to start from VND17.5 million a square meter. The project is still under construction and will be delivered to homebuyers in the fourth quarter this year.
After the success in the first sale, the Ehome 3 scheme has kept introducing about 150 flats to the market. Similarly, the Au Co Tower project in Tan Phu District with 288 condos will be marketed at some VND1.2 billion a unit.
The fact that developers of a few housing schemes have revised down prices is considered a positive move to reduce mounting inventories, Townsend said.
