Need to improve legal framework to support investment in real estate, preventing economic bubble

Mr. Neil MacGregor, General Director of Savills Vietnam

The real estate market has experienced a difficult year in 2021. In your opinion, by 2022, which segment will be the bright spot for the market?

In the residential real estate segment, I think that in 2022 urban areas will develop strongly. Some key urban areas developed in the past few years are located in Dong Nai, Long An and Binh Duong provinces. This will continue to be the main trend in the near future when the supply of residential real estate in Ho Chi Minh City is too low, so investors and real estate developers will turn to new urban areas when there is an infrastructure to bridge these areas with the city where they work.

Besides, industrial and logistics real estate will continue to increase. This is a highly sought-after segment in the past few years, I believe this will continue and create growth momentum when factories start to set up a base in Vietnam to invest in new projects.

For example, the recent announcement that a LEGO factory will be built in Vietnam and apply high environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards to their designs.

The industrial and logistics real estate segment will also welcome a number of new areas. There will be growth in the distribution of warehouses and services of e-commerce as well as logistics to serve the domestic market, due to the geographical characteristics of Vietnam with key cities all needing this distribution.

Other areas of growth can come from data centers as internet use is increasing, requiring a large source to store data.

Besides, cold storage also has links with e-commerce. Sellers on e-commerce sites have to find ways to store goods, and this leads to an increase in demand for cold storage.

This year, in your opinion, what are the difficulties that Vietnam's real estate market may face?

The difficulty for investors or owners of residential real estate is the lack of supply. Currently, there is a shortage of supply in the market. For buyers, particularly with low affordability, there are very few housing options in Ho Chi Minh City at the moment.

For large business owners, finding an office with large space in the city center is not easy, and they will have to look to the area outside the center.

The industrial sector also faces a similar situation when the supply in the city is short. This is one of the biggest challenges for real estate developers, homebuyers, even office owners or people working in industry and logistics, who have very few real estate options at this time.

Therefore, I think the important thing that the Government needs to do is support expanding the supply of real estate to the market so that real estate and economic bubbles do not occur.

Otherwise, prices will continue to climb in 2022 and the real estate industry will become untouchable even for home buyers, office tenants or investors in the industrial sector.

According to Savills' forecast, will there be any new product lines appearing in the Vietnamese market in 2022?

The Vietnamese market will not necessarily have new products, but products that the market needs will appear. As I just mentioned above, data centers will be the main development area of the market because the big data source generated by the digital economy is in need of storage. Therefore, there will be a great interest in data center development. This is not an easy area for investors, but we expect growth.

Moreover, there will be a need to use cold storage for e-commerce and individuals who need to store goods. Besides, the return of the tourism - restaurant - hotel industry also requires supply from the cold storage sector.

In summary, as I said above, neighboring cities and provinces are experiencing supply shortages, and it is important for the government to continue to improve the proactive regulatory framework to support multiple sources of investment into real estate, including a framework for projects to happen on time.

In this way, we can prevent economic bubbles from appearing, leading to more supply into the market as well as encouraging more FDI sources to invest in the real estate industry.

When this happens, real estate buyers, developers and owners will have more products to choose from the inner districts of major cities and neighboring provinces.