Asian Properties Cooling Down
07 September 2011
he latest news in second week of September 2011 coming from Hong Kong showed that perhaps things were about to cool down somewhat in the next few months.
The land sales seemed to be fetching lower end of estimates or even slightly lower, thus indicating developers' expectations of slower sales or no longer higher prices.
The news coming from Singapore too, despite a new record high price for the upper luxury segment at SGD 6,400 psf for a unit in The Marq, seemed to indicate some slow down, especially due to increasing nervousness in the global financial market in the last few weeks.
Having said that, though, the slow down in Singapore has been so far moderate, not drastic. The buying power and buying interest seemed to be intact.
As to China, they too seemed to get the cooling measures to deliver the results they intended to have, at least in their major cities.
In the long run, I think we can still expect to see Hong Kong and Singapore properties behaving the way they had been for decades, i.e. Up and down, trending upwards. These kind of exposure from investment point of view probably suits those who can stomach it with huge buffer. These are not for the faint hearted. Something similar may also apply for the future in major mainland China cities as the prices have reached relatively high plateaus from which they might behave differently from what they had been in the past.