Poly Spent RMB 10.1B on Mainland Sites in One Day and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

While the number of bids for mainland housing sites seems to be falling off the map, it’s clear that some of the biggest developers still have cash for sites after state-owned Poly spend nearly $1.5 billion to buy a pair of projects in a single day. Hong Kong co-working operator Campfire may not be Poly’s league just yet, but still managed to bring in $18 million to fund its efforts to go global, and the marketers of one of Singapore’s biggest collective sale projects have been kind enough to give buyers another month to come up with S$1.1 for their little piece of the city-state. Read on for all these stories and more.

Poly Spent RMB 10.1B to Buy Two Mainland Sites in One Day

Poly Real Estate, a Chinese developer and subsidiary of state-owned China Poly Group, spent about 10.1 billion yuan (US$1.49 billion) in one day to win two plots, despite the downward trend in land markets, The Paper reported.

On Tuesday, the developer secured an urban residential property in Suzhou city, Jiangsu province, with an expenditure of 1.556 billion yuan. The floor price was 26,002 yuan per square meter and the premium rate was 4.01%. Read more>>

HK Co-Working Startup Campfire Scores $18M in Funding

WeWork may be doubling down on Asia, having initially focused its efforts on China, but that isn’t stopping local players from hatching ambitious expansion plans of their own.

One of those eying new markets is Hong Kong-based Campfire, which tries to stand out from the crowd with industry-focused spaces. Today, the startup announced it has raised an $18 million Series A ahead of planned expansions to three overseas countries: Singapore, Australia and the UK. It previously raised $6 million in March 2017. Read more>>

Sellers of S$1.1B SG Site Give Buyers One More Month to Think It Over

Horizon Towers has extended its collective sale tender closing date by more than a month, after cooling measures that took effect the day after the site was launched for sale on July 5 with a $1.1 billion reserve price.

The collective sale committee, in consultation with marketing agent JLL and lawyers Lee & Lee, decided to extend the deadline in the light of those changes, which include an increase in the Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty (ABSD) rates, a tightening of mortgage loan-to-value limits across the board, and a non-remissible ABSD of 5 per cent for residential land purchases, JLL said in a statement yesterday. Read more>>

Chinese Real Estate Giants Vanish From US Market After Two Year Rampage

Chinese real-estate investors, facing pressure from Beijing, are reversing a yearslong buying spree in the U.S. where they often paid record prices for marquee properties like New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Chinese insurers, conglomerates, and other investors have turned net sellers of U.S. commercial real estate for the first time in a decade. They have spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire hotels, office buildings, and vast swaths of empty land to build residential towers. Read more>>

Maybank Provides A$100M Backing for Malaysian Melbourne Project

Malaysian-backed developer Beulah International has received $100 million in financing from Maybank for its luxury apartment tower, Paragon, in Melbourne’s CBD.

With close to 90 per cent of apartments purchased during the registration of interest campaign, the $200 million development will now see 227 luxury apartments built across 48 levels. Read more>>

SG’s Sembcorp Sells Stake in Wuxi Project for RMB 323M

Sembcorp Industries on Tuesday said its unit, Singapore Wuxi Investment Holdings (SWIH), has agreed to sell its entire 49 per cent equity interest in the capital of Wuxi Singapore Property Investment Co (WSPI) to Golden Concord and Shanghai Sunac Real Estate Development Co for 323 million yuan (S$68 million).

The sale, made fully in cash, is expected to result in a net gain for SWIH of S$13 million, and a net gain for Sembcorp of S$12 million for the financial year ending Dec 31, 2018. Sembcorp has a 92.6 per cent effective stake in SWIH through its wholly owned subsidiary. Read more>>

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