VARIABLES TO IMPACT ON 2022 REAL ESTATE PRICE

09/02/2022

Mr. Pham Lam, Vice Chairman of Vietnam Association of Real Estate Brokers, said at least 6 big variables are affecting housing prices this year.

Infrastructure

According to Mr. Lam, 2022 will be a pivotal year to witness a series of infrastructure projects being accelerated thanks to the Government's determination to facilitate disbursement of public investment budget, in which that of infrastructure projects account for a large proportion. Practical experience shows that for every dong of public investment will increase social investment by 8-10 dong. If tens of trillion dong of the public investment are disbursed, they will stimulate the market at the scale of hundreds of trillion dong. This will be a tremendous boost for real estate prices to follow the upward trend in previous years.

He analyzed, regarding the airport planning, 5 airports’ plans were approved by 2030 with a total investment budget of up to 126,159 billion VND, of which Long Thanh and Dong Nai international airports’ progress are being accelerated in 2022. These airports cannot be completed overnight, but since their plans were announced, resources have flown into the neighborhood having new infrastructure, causing land prices to take an upturn.

Meanwhile, the development of road transport also pushed land prices to new heights. In 2021, Vietnam had 1,163 km of expressways, and about 916 km will have been completed by 2023, bringing the total length of expressways nationwide to 2,079 km. In particular, the East North-South Expressway has a total planned length of 2,063 km, in which 478 km were put into operation, 829 km are under investment, and the remaining 756 km have not been invested. In the 2021-2025 period, 729 km of the routes Bai Vot - Cam Lo, Quang Ngai - Nha Trang and Can Tho - Ca Mau will be invested. This data shows that the implementation of infrastructure projects mainly falls in 2022.

The vice president of the Vietnam Association of Real Estate Brokers commented that thanks to the continuous growth of highways, airports, bridges and roads, land prices along these infrastructure routes will receive a double benefit from convenient transportation, economic and commercial development, as well as the growth of urban, housing and resort projects. The infrastructure has supported the formation of satellite urban areas, promoting the real estate market to further expand the area, with more diverse products and prices increasing in parallel with the wider connection of infrastructure.

Macroeconomic

In order to ensure economic growth and recovery and macro stability, the 2022 economic stimulus package launched on a large scale is also a huge driving force affecting the real estate market. Packages of fiscal solutions such as tax exemption and reduction, investment and development, etc. are forecasted to support production and business, contributing to increasing consumption, improving purchasing power, and promoting demand for real estate ownership to live and invest.

According to Mr. Lam, macroeconomics is one of the vital variables affecting the improvement of the real estate market over the past decades, whether in a stable or uncertain cycle. It is conceivable that when the economy develops, investment resources become substantial, real estate prices rise due to the high demand for purchasing properties for use (for living) as well as for investment and accumulation.

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In the event of economic fluctuations, capital flows still flow into an asset attached to land as a safe haven, which is the first choice of investors, causing land prices to keep increasing. In case of normal economic development, real estate prices grow steadily, and when the economy flourishes, land prices rise rapidly, and property prices only increase gradually if the macro-economy turns unstable. The market movement in the 2020-2021 period is an example that, despite the pandemic and economic difficulties, housing prices still escalate. At this time, seeking for a safe haven is a better choice than investment.

Interest rate

Over the past few years, credit management with low savings interest rates has contributed to stimulating capital flow into other investment channels, in which real estate covers a large proportion. The trend of low interest rates is likely to continue in 2022. Financial investors always compare the efficiency of real estate investment with savings, securities, gold, foreign currencies, bonds, production and business, etc. In early 2022, the profitability of real estate in the long-term still cements a high position in the rankings of effective investment channels.

The variable of low interest rates increases the demand of finding a safe haven for capital flows and pointing out why the housing market still retains old investors and welcomes more young ones. Various surveys on the potential of real estate investment show that the number of F0 investors (first-time investors in the real estate market) are expected to increase in the next 12 months. The demand (teams of buyers) increases while the supply (volume of products) has not kept up with, which causes the selling price of real estate to take an upward trend.

Legal affairs

In the last 3 years, the supply of the real estate market has dropped sharply due to legal problems and the pandemic, which has become a variable directly affecting product prices and property investment efficiency. At the end of last year, the Government proposed to amend a number of regulations on construction of houses and urban areas during an extraordinary session of the National Assembly. Thanks to this positive signal, a series of legal difficulties related to the real estate market have been focused on solving in the 2020 - 2021 period, but it is not until 2022 that new regulations gradually become effective.

However, new regulations usually take a long period of 6-9 months to be applied, thus, during the waiting time for guiding documents, the supply of real estate will still be affected and housing prices will tend to increase in the first quarters of 2022.

Pandemic

In the two years of Covid-19 (2020-2021), housing prices still increased despite the anti-epidemic process, which devastated the economy. In 2022, the pandemic variable shows that the level of danger has decreased compared to 2021 because the Covid-19 has been actively controlled both domestically and globally by high-coverage vaccination. However, 2022 housing prices are still more or less affected when this variable cannot be eliminated immediately because it is difficult to forecast the emergence of new variants.

Crowd psychology

The majority of Vietnamese people have a strong sense of home-ownership passed on from generation to generation with a growing tendency. Therefore, the real estate investment market and the ability to increase property prices, especially the land-attached group, are greatly influenced by crowd psychology. The phenomena of land fever, house price increases, and property speculation have all originated in crowd psychology over the past decades. Therefore, this variable continues to influence the increase in real estate prices this year.

In addition to the above-mentioned variables, Mr. Lam analyzed, there are still factors that can lead to 2022 housing prices escalating such as an increase in real estate income tax when tax management is tightened, materials and labor costs, total costs for the whole product development cycle, etc. are on the rise. However, these costs can be estimated with relative accuracy.

A range of extremely large variables and various factors that constitute housing prices are still present as strong driving forces leading to 2022 real estate prices taking an upturn. Lam said, this requires the management agencies to strengthen policies to support low-cost housing in this year and the coming years to ensure housing security because the price of most of the supply has already skyrocketed, making it hard for low-income people to afford.

 According to Vnexpress