Thousands of apartments stay empty in Vietnam

About 3,300 apartments and houses still remain empty or haven't been approved for sale and rental in the first quarter of 2021.

About 3,300 apartments and houses still remain empty or haven't been approved for sale and rental in the first quarter of 2021.

  

Thousands of apartments stay empty in Vietnam

Ministry of Construction's report for Q1 show that 25,386 real estate transactions had been carried out successfully, a drop of 14% compared to the final quarter of 2020. About 3,300 apartments and houses remain empty or haven't been put up for sale. In the northern region, 11,011 transactions were carried out successfully. There were 8,307 successful transactions in the central region and 6,068 transactions in the southern region. 5,571 of the transactions were in Hanoi and 3,449 were in HCM City.

The majority of them were affordable apartments and houses as the number of high-end residential real estate transactions sharply decreased.

According to the Ministry of Construction, the real estate market has been better compared to the Q1 and Q4 in 2020. Most of the empty real estate projects are in Phu Tho, Vinh Phuc and Ha Tinh provinces. Big cities like Hanoi and HCM City and provinces with fast urbanisation rates like Nghe An, Hung Yen and Lam Dong still saw a stable trading rate.

However, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the tourism sector has been one of the hardest-hit sectors and other tourism projects have also been badly affected.

The number of the residential apartment projects reviewed by the Construction Management Department for building permit was 2,041, accounting for 36% of the total number in 2020's Q4. There were 250 reviewed hometel projects while the number of tourist villa and officetel projects was both zero.

The number of the apartment that received building regulation approvals before they were put on sale by the Department of Construction Quality Assessment was 14,292, a drop of 39% on 2020's Q4. The number of approved hometels was 884, an increase of 70%. The number of approved officetels and tourist villas both saw an increase and decrease. The number of approved office-tel was 452, while this figure in 2020's Q4 was zero. The number of tourist villas was zero while it was 79 in 2020's Q4.