Foreign Property News | Posted by Si Thu Aung
Major real-estate investment hit a record US$86 billion in the Asia-Pacific region in the first half of 2019 despite a softening global market.
It was mainly led by strong momentum in China, leading property consultancy JLL said in its latest report.
That marked a year-on-year increase of 6 percent, in contrast to the 9 percent drop in transactions around the globe — US$341 billion for the first six months, according to the Global Capital Flows released yesterday by JLL.
“Due to the tightening of yields in core markets across the globe, particularly in Europe and the US, investors were made to look beyond their domestic markets in search of higher returns,” said Stuart Crow, CEO of Capital Markets Asia Pacific at JLL.
In China, ranked the world’s second most liquid real-estate market during the first half of this year, a record-setting start to the year propelled first-half volumes to a record high of 170.7 billion yuan (US$24.1 billion), a year-on-year surge of 137 percent.
China’s real-estate investment market has become notably more active since the last quarter of 2018 as foreign investors continued to increase their spending.
Total investment in China reached 214.4 billion yuan during the six months through March, exceeding the average annual volume of the past three years, according to JLL’s data.
Among the most significant cross-border transactions of the second quarter in China was Brookfield’s acquisition of a mixed-use commercial complex in Shanghai.
The US$1.5 billion deal is the biggest by the firm in China and one of the largest by a foreign investor in the country.
Ref: Property Report
