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Draft master plan for capital prompts speculation in bits of property
Wander into a Vietnamese office in Hanoi these days and you’ll overhear white collar staff trading passionate stories about land trading.
‘Buying means winning’
Khai’s monthly salary can feed his family, but it can’t make them rich. “If I want to become rich, therefore, I have to make investments,” says the officer of an information company in Hanoi’s Hoang Mai District.
Khai has many investment projects. He has traded in gold, stocks and foreign currencies, and now he trades in land.
Having experienced ups and downs, Khai has come to the conclusion that real estate trading is the most profitable route to riches. “All the millionaires in the world become rich thanks to real estate investment deals,” he says.
Over the past six months, Khai and his wife have become the owners of several hundred of square metres of land in the Thien Son - Suoi Nga tourism zone of Ba Vi district near Hanoi. Khai’s golden principal is that “Buying means winning,” meaning that every deal today can bring profit tomorrow
Khai said that because land prices escalate day by day, he can make fat profits as a trader. He bought three sao (36 square meters) of land for 75 million dong, and sold it later for 120 million. In another deal, Khai bought a piece of roadside land for 28 million dong per square metre. Less than two months later, he was offered 85 million dong per square metre for the plot.
As Khai has been busy ‘hunting’ for land, he has regularly been absent from his day job. He asks his boss for days off because he ‘feels sick’ or he is on compassionate leave. Khai is never at home on weekends, because he is busy looking for land plots to purchase.
Like Khai, Hoai Chi, who works for one of the Vietnam Post and Telegraph companies, now spends most of her time trading in land. “Nothing else can bring such a fat profit,” she says. Chi comes to the office everyday at exactly 8 am to be present at roll-call, and then she leaves to do her main job – trading in land.
Though it is profitable to trade in land, Chi explains, this kind of business always requires a lot of capital. People only need ten or twenty million dong to dabble in stocks or gold. To trade in land, people need to have one billion at least. If someone does not have such a big sum of money in hand, he needs to join forces with friends and relatives.
Binh, an officer of a home appliance centre, has a salary of nearly one thousand dollars a month, a high income level in Vietnam. However, he speculates in land as well. He calls it “the easiest way to make money, one that doesn’t require too much time and effort.”
“You want to find some land to purchase? You can do this on a weekend. You need to do some research? You can browse the Internet while you are sitting in your office,” Binh says. He adds that at his company, everyone from junior officers to ‘big bosses,’ is investing in real estate.
Why are the profits so ‘fat’?
Land expert Dang Hung Vo, a former Deputy Environment Minister, told VietNamNet that Hanoi’s new draft master plan is driving a land price bubble. People believe that this area or that one will be the where the Government will develop facilities in the near future. Therefore, they rush to purchase land plots, believing that the price can only go up when these rural areas turn into crowded towns
“Several years ago, it was the same with the stock market,” Vo observes. People rushed to buy stocks, because they believed that ‘buying means winning.’ At last the bubble burst; the stock prices fell suddenly and a lot of investors incurred heavy losses.
Nguyen Nga
vietnamnet
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