Yanlord, Perennial Lead $1.3B Deal for United Engineers and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

At the top of today’s news, Yanlord Land and Perennial Real Estate are leading a group to acquire United Engineers, the century-old Singaporean property firm, for $1.3 billion in one of the city-state’s biggest recent property takeover deals. Further north, the world of Asia real estate is getting chilly, with HNA Group reportedly putting some big outbound transactions on ice, and the Beijing municipal government confirming what we knew all along, that it has frozen the housing market with an official cap on home prices. Read on for all these stories and more.

Yanlord, Perennial Lead $1.3B Deal to Buy Singapore’s United Engineers

Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) and its insurance arm are selling their stakes in property firm United Engineers and a subsidiary to a group led by China’s Yanlord Land Group and Perennial Real Estate Holdings.

The deal values the two targets at roughly S$1.83 billion (A$1.7 billion) in one of the biggest property takeover deals in the city state in recent years. Read more>>

HNA Said to Put Overseas Deals on Ice Amid Crackdown

One of China’s most prolific overseas acquirers, the airlines-and-hotels conglomerate HNA Group Co., is drastically slowing its deal making, suggesting that a government crackdown on debt might be crimping its global ambitions.

HNA has recently told people involved in its deals that it is putting mergers-and-acquisitions activity on hold for now, said some people familiar with the discussions. The group is looking at fewer targets and engaging in fewer discussions about potential acquisitions, another person familiar with HNA’s plans said. Read more>>

Beijing City Government Confirms It’s Capping Home Prices

Beijing’s municipal government for the first time clarified that it won’t allow new residential projects to go on sale if prices are higher than those sold in earlier launches, releasing a formal policy that gives weight to mayor’s pledge to arrest price gains in 2017.

In an annual white paper released on Wednesday, Beijing Municipal Commission for Housing and Urban-rural Development vowed to block issuance of presale permits to developers if they apply to sell at a price “conspicuously higher than previous ones and surrounding projects’ price”, putting off any room for developers to raise prices. Read more>>

Kaisa Pays $110M for Stake in Shenzhen Landowner Nam Tai

Kaisa Group Holdings announced this week that it agreed to pay US$110 million for a 17.7 percent stake in US-listed Nam Tai Property. The Hong Kong company was founded by M.K. Koo, who decided to shut down the manufacturing operation earlier this year and focused instead on wringing value from the firm’s real-estate assets – two land plots in Shenzhen.

The company filed applications to convert the use of two land plots in Shenzhen into commercial and residential complexes, namely Nam Tai Inno Park and Nam Tai Inno City. The two projects have a combined floor area of more than 700,000 square meters, with total investment estimated to be 9 billion yuan. Construction work is expected to commence next year. Read more>>

Shanghai Mall Unveils Husband Storage Units

The sight of women undertaking retail therapy with bored spouses or boyfriends in tow is certainly not confined to China, but a mall in the country’s biggest city has come up with unique remedy to keep at least the men happy, an official news website reports.

Global Harbour, Shanghai’s largest mall, recently launched four “husband rest hatches” where long-suffering boyfriends and husbands can put their feet up and play computer games while their significant others shop till they drop, Thepaper.cn reported on Thursday. Read more>>

HK Think Tank Urges Land Reclamation to Tackle Housing Crisis

The new leadership of the Hong Kong government should consider restarting land reclamation to increase land supply to build new homes as a means to resolve the city’s housing problem in the long run, according to a government think tank and a property agent.

Stephen Wong, deputy executive director and head of public policy of a think tank, Our Hong Kong Foundation said Hong Kong’s medium and long term housing supply was lagging behind its target, and urged the government to restart a large-scale development to solve the housing problem. Read more>>

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