Chinese property firms continue to cut their Australian holdings, with that story leading Mingtiandi’s headline roundup today. Blackstone is also making news as it champions easier business rules in India, and the same country’s Embassy REIT plans to raise $400 million to help meet demand for office space.
Chinese Property Exodus Gains Pace With $79M Sydney Project Sale
Major Chinese companies are continuing to slash their Australian holdings, with Dahua Group selling a major project to local developer DASCO for more than A$120 million ($78.9 million).
The Shanghai-based company’s exit from the project will add to the mounting list of Chinese developers who have either exited or sold down their Australian holdings. Read more>>
Blackstone Seeks Easier Rules for Privatisation, M&A in India
Blackstone expects dealmaking to remain strong in India, its third-largest business globally, even as it pushes for regulatory changes to make it easier to operate in the country.
The Indian government had taken several steps to ease doing business, including introducing a goods and services tax and changing bankruptcy laws. Steps such as these have allowed firms like Blackstone to gather nearly $50 billion in assets under management in the country, said president Jonathan Gray. Read more>>
Embassy REIT Plans to Raise Up to $400M, Hires Banks
India’s largest REIT, Embassy Office Parks, plans to raise up to $400 million from investors, two sources with direct knowledge said, as it looks to meet demand for office space from global and local giants.
Embassy, which manages 45 million square feet (4.2 million square metres) of office parks, has clients including Google, Cisco and IBM that are bolstering their presence in the world’s fifth-biggest economy. Read more>>
China Vanke Extends Slump as Housing Sales Decline 43%
China Vanke, at one time the largest listed developer in the country, suffered another slump last month, joining other real estate firms with declining home sales.
Contracted sales for March were RMB 24.5 billion ($3.4 billion), the company said in a filing Wednesday. That represents a 43 percent decline from a year earlier and follows a 53 percent year-on-year plunge the previous month. Read more>>
Hong Kong’s CK Asset Eyes Properties Linked to Vietnam Bank Fraud
Hong Kong developer CK Asset Holdings has expressed interest in properties worth billions of dollars linked to Vietnam’s biggest financial fraud, letters written to a court showed.
Prosecutors have accused real estate tycoon Truong My Lan of being the architect of a scheme of loans to shell companies that siphoned off VND 304 trillion ($12 billion) from one of the country’s largest private banks by assets, Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank, which Lan effectively controlled through proxies. Read more>>
China Property Market at Risk of Overcorrection, Not Oversupply: PAG’s Weijian Shan
A Chinese former official made headlines last September by saying China had so many vacant homes that even its 1.4 billion population couldn’t hope to fill them all. Estimates suggested there were enough vacant properties to house as many as 3 billion people.
If true, China’s housing market is doomed. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the market’s demise are an exaggeration. Read more>>
Singapore Real Estate Icon Dennis Wee Dies at 71
Dennis Wee, heralded as a legend in Singapore’s real estate trade, died Wednesday at the age of 71 after a battle with cancer.
Wee set up Dennis Wee Group in 1992, and it grew to become one of the most well-known property agencies of the era. In 2017, DWG merged with PropNex Realty, which reportedly paid S$5 million (now $3.7 million) for the takeover. Read more>>
Fewer Transactions But Firmer Prices as CBD Shophouses Lure Investors
Sales volumes are down but prices are firm in what is the creme de la creme of the commercial shophouse market: central business district shophouses.
The average transacted unit price on land area of CBD shophouses climbed by nearly 18 percent to S$11,098 ($8,233) per square foot in 2023, said PropNex Realty’s head of research and content, Wong Siew Ying. Read more>>
Tune in again soon for more real estate news and be sure to follow @Mingtiandi on X, or bookmark Mingtiandi’s LinkedIn page for headlines as they happen.
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