HK$100B West Kowloon Site Expected to Bring JV Bids and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

All eyes are on a prime commercial site sitting atop West Kowloon’s high-speed rail terminus as developers line up joint bids for what should be Hong Kong’s most expensive property to ever go up for sale. Those quirky mainland millennials are also in the news today as they begin snapping up homes in Bangkok and Phuket via their Xiaomis and Oppos, and with Chinese capital still getting squeezed, US EB-5 visa projects are turning to Vietnam as their new source of cheap financing. All these stories and more await you in Mingtiandi’s roundup of news from around the region.

Is Hong Kong’s Hottest Property Too Costly for a Single Developer?

Is Hong Kong’s most expensive property ever to go up for sale too costly for any single developer?

The city’s hottest prime commercial site – sitting atop the West Kowloon high-speed rail terminus – is expected to sell for roughly HK$100 billion (US$12.7 billion). That is likely to spur developers to form one or two consortiums, property experts say, to spread risk and simply come up with the staggering sum of money.

Sun Hung Kai Properties, the city’s top developer with HK$26 billion, confirmed to the South China Morning Post that it is open to either bidding individually or as part of a consortium in the as yet-to-be scheduled tender. The government intends to sell the plot above the new Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link as a whole. Read more>>

Chinese Millennials Are Buying Asian Property Online

Ice Chen, a 36-year-old bank manager in Beijing, hasn’t been to Bangkok lately, but she just bought two apartments there. The millennial is among younger Chinese flocking to specialist online platforms to buy international real estate.

The biggest of the sites, Uoolu.com, reported a 60 percent surge in transactions to RMB five billion ($740 million) in 2018 and predicts a doubling this year. Much of the money is flowing to destinations in South-east Asia, where prices look cheap compared to Beijing or Shanghai. Read more>>

US EB-5 Projects Turn to Vietnam for Financing

As Chinese investors sour on a program that offers American residency in exchange for certain real-estate investments, U.S. developers are turning to a new, fast-growing source of cheap capital: Vietnam.

The Southeast Asian country is rapidly gaining on China as one of the biggest participants in the foreign-investment initiative known as EB-5. The program offers green cards in return for investing in job-creating U.S. businesses or real-estate projects. Read more>>

Actis, Shapoorji Pallonji Launch $120M Affordable Housing JV in Africa

Actis, a leading growth markets investor, and Shapoorji Pallonji Real Estate (SPRE), the real estate arm of one of India’s largest conglomerates, are set to launch a new real estate joint-venture platform to meet the demand for affordable and middle-income housing in the sub-Saharan African region, starting with Kenya.

The residential development platform has been established to capitalize on the demand for quality homes at affordable and competitive price points. Read more>>

Bengaluru’s Le Meridien Hotel to be Razed, Replaced with Office

The iconic Le Meridien hotel on Bengaluru’s Sankey Road will be history in the coming months, The Times of India reported on Wednesday.

Embassy Group plans to pull down the building to make way for an office space in one of the most posh areas in the city. Le Meridien overlooks the serene and iconic Bangalore Golf Club and boasts of 197 rooms and 30 suites. Read more>>

Manila Beats Boston, Paris, Tokyo as World’s Hottest Luxury Home Market

Manila is the hottest luxury home market in the world, beating out the likes of Boston, Tokyo and Paris, property consultancy Knight Frank said.

Luxury prices shot up 11 percent in 2018, as the capital city of the Philippines got a boost from a robust economy, shortage of luxury homes and increased appetite for them by wealthy foreigners living there.

The ranking of 100 cities is based solely on how much their luxury home prices increased last year. The only other Asian city in the top 10 list was Singapore, where prices jumped 9.1 per cent. Read more>>

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