The Vietnamese property market has been one that was in a state of hibernation for a very long time.
A few months ago, that state of hibernation was abruptly broken by property developers and companies from nearby Malaysia drawing a line in the sand and starting to acquire land in the country to construct property dwellings for the increasingly wealthy people of the major Vietnamese urban centres. These urban centres have a lot of money, but not that much first-class housing, and it appears as if many companies are now vying with each other to get a piece of the upscale property market pie in Vietnam before things really begin to take off.
In fact, many of the urban centres within the country have begun to get very serious about foreign property investment, some of them going a long way towards attempting to secure a lot of it for the 2008 year.
A good example of one of these cities is Da Nang city, which has specifically come out and with a plan to raise $350 million in funds from foreign investment for the 2008 year. This would represent an increase of approximately $50 million from what the city was able to acquire in 2007.
The really interesting part of this market, however, is that the money that they plan to raise above their target for last year will almost exclusively be going to property development and the construction of different dwellings. Specifically, the government of the city is interested in constructing high-rise apartments of all kinds as well as any high-end dwellings that investors might be interested in.
They are also interested in the construction of commercial property structures, and therefore, the city itself has become a veritable gold mind of opportunity for foreign investors looking for new property markets to get involved in.