Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui

While property investors are encountering difficulties finding customers for their projects, many customers still set aside millions of US dollars to buy a luxury villa.

HCM City's sleepy apartment market sees no sign of improvements amid a difficult economy.

The housing markets in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City will continue to see price falls in 2012 as cities across Asia-Pacific are expected to have weaker sales volumes, according to global property consultant Knight Frank.

Investors should pay heed to the potential for serviced apartments in Vietnam because demand for this segment was forecast to increase and current supply was limited, Marc Townsend, managing director of CBRE, said at a conference on Thursday.

Condos investors in Vietnam recently announced to sell products at 30 percent discount price, attracting a lot of customers and real estate traders. But is the price real ?

Land prices in Hanoi and HCM City are equivalent to 80 years of rental costs, the World Bank has said.

Colliers International's market report in quarter 3 revealed land prices in central districts of Hanoi of at approximately US $ 27,200 per square metre (or 570 million dong) that is as expensive as those in Tokyo and Paris.

Four years after a real estate boom that saw investors camp out on the streets waiting to pay cash for unbuilt apartments, Vietnam's once-hot property market has caught a chill.

Not content with promotional programmes, discounts and flexible payments, some property investors in the country have gone so far as to give profit pledges to customers to improve home sales during the gloomy market.

Vietnam is planning to require residential developers to earmark at least 80 percent of their project sites for apartments, minister of Construction Nguyen Tran Nam said.

The HCM City office building market has slumped with landlords struggling to find tenants due to falling demand and huge supply coming into the market.

According to real estate experts, homebuyers in the capital are paying far more than HCM City residents, despite lower per capita incomes, due to poor development procedures, speculation and lack of supply.

The Ministry of Construction has proposed a new rule that bans project developers to sell land and half-built houses to customers.

Saigon Invest Group (SGI), which is the developer of over 20 industrial zones in Vietnam and other real estate projects, late last week broke ground on a 60 billion dong hotel project in Laos.

The HCM City Real Estate Association says high interest rates have stopped local developers from investing in new projects.