Discounted Site in HK’s Lohas Park Pulls 9 Bids and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

The sale of a residential plot leads the way in Mingtiandi’s roundup of Asia real estate headlines today with the news that nine bids were submitted for a heavily discounted site in Hong Kong’s New Territories.

In other news around the region, a major Hong Kong developer has suspended construction on all of its sites in the city until 17 February, while a Singapore fund manager steps up its fight to remove the chairman of Cromwell Property.

Elsewhere, property agents in mainland China brace for a slump in the housing market as homebuyers retreat amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Hong Kong Developers Bid for Discounted Lohas Park Housing Site

Not even the coronavirus outbreak is stopping Hong Kong’s biggest developers from bidding for the biggest plot of land within the Lohas Park development in New Territories in five years. The land tender also came with a sweetener in lower land premium.

There were nine bids for the 961,100 square foot (89,290 square metre) plot in the southeast of the New Territories, according to the MTR Corporation. The plot can accommodate up to 2,000 homes, making it the largest among the phases in Lohas Park in the past five years. Read more>>

New World Development Suspends Construction on All Hong Kong Sites

New World Development became the first local developer to shut down all of its construction sites for two weeks from yesterday until February 17 amid the coronavirus outbreak, as the number of completed private residential units fell to a four-year low in 2019.

The developer said it would review the epidemic’s development on a weekly basis and adjust the reopening day of construction sites if required. Read more>>

ARA Demands Cromwell Chairman Stand Down

Cromwell Property Group’s largest shareholder, Singaporean real estate giant ARA Asset Management, is nothing if not persistent.

ARA’s lawyers at Arnold Bloch Leibler shot off a notice of resolution on Tuesday morning to Cromwell, demanding its chairman Geoff Levy stand down and that ARA’s nominated candidate, famed corporate raider Gary Weiss, be added to the Cromwell board. Read more>>

China Evergrande January Sales Slide 6%

China Evergrande Group said contracted sales of properties for January dropped about 6.1 percent year-on-year to RMB 40.55 billion ($5.8 billion).

The contracted sales area rose 16 percent to 45 million square metres (484 million square feet) and the average price of contracted sales was RMB 9,016 per square metre. A total of 1,246 projects are suspended and 1,040 of the group’s sales centres are closed until February 20 due to the novel coronavirus. Read more>>

Canadian Pension Fund, Keppel in Talks to Raise $400M for Indian REIT

Developer Prestige Group is in talks with Canadian pension fund Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Singapore-based diversified conglomerate Keppel Corporation and a Japanese institutional investor to raise around $400 million by monetising its portfolio of income-producing assets including office and retail properties, said three persons with direct knowledge of the development.

The fund raising is expected to be concluded over the next three months and will be a pre-cursor to listing of Prestige’s REIT. Read more>>

China Property Agents Brace as Housing Market Grinds to a Halt

China’s residential property market has come to a standstill as sales offices are ordered to shut amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Some agents are bracing for a slump in sales of as much as 80 per cent this month. Read more>>

Singapore Residential Property Yield No Better Than Retirement Fund

In property-crazed Singapore, owning real estate isn’t always the high-yielding investment you might think.

The rate of return for private apartments in the Republic has slipped since 2011, when measures to cool the market were introduced by the Government. In fact, some units now have a lower yield than the country’s national retirement plan, the Central Provident Fund (CPF), which has a minimum fixed rate of return of 2.5 per cent, research from property analytics start-up UrbanZoom shows. Read more>>

Tune in again tomorrow for more news, and be sure to follow @Mingtiandi on Twitter, or bookmark Mingtiandi’s LinkedIn page for headlines as they happen.

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