Capitaland buys suburban Ho Chi Minh City residential site for $59m

It’s been a busy week for Southeast Asia’s biggest real estate developer, as CapitaLand today announced its VND 1.38 billion ($58.98 million) acquisition of a site in the eastern suburbs of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.

The acquisition of the 60,000 square metre (645,834 square foot) site in Binh Trung Dong Ward of HCMC’s District Two, gives CapitaLand the opportunity to build 100 landed homes in an area that Vietnamese authorities have been positioning as their version of Shanghai’s Pudong district.

The site acquisition, which paves the way for CapitaLand’s thirteenth residential development in one of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing economies, also provides the developer with the opportunity to reinvest some S$397.6 million ($290.6 million) in proceeds from its sale of a 70 percent stake in a Singapore shopping mall earlier this week, and comes just one day after it surprised the region’s real estate community with news of a new CEO.

“We are pleased to bag another highly coveted site in Vietnam, where our ninth residential development in the fast-growing District Two of Ho Chi Minh City will be built,” CapitaLand’s president and outgoing group CEO Lim Ming Yan said in a statement.

This latest acquisition will add to CapitaLand’s existing S$1.1 billion portfolio in Vietnam, which now ranks as the company’s third-largest market in Southeast Asia, after Singapore and Malaysia.

Before purchasing this landed home site, the Singaporean developer’s existing holdings in the country included two integrated developments, 12 residential developments totalling close to c 8,000 homes across, two shopping centres, and more than 4,800 serviced apartment units in 21 serviced residences across seven cities.

In March of this year CapitaLand announced a joint venture to build a mixed-use development on a 0.9-hectare site in Hanoi’s Tay Ho District, and in November last year the company paid the equivalent of $177 million to purchase a site for a 24-storey, 870-unit residential development in Ho Chi Minh City.

Ref: Property Report