Vietnam’s property market has been badly hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, with apartment prices in Ho Chi Minh City falling by 14.51% during 2020, in inflation-adjusted terms, in stark contrast to a whopping 69.47% house price rise in 2019. Quarter-on-quarter, house prices increased 1.93% in Q4 2020. Vietnam opened up to foreign homebuyers in 2015 and has expanded strongly since. The majority of foreign buyers come from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, and South Korea. Unfortunately, Vietnam’s housing market has been badly hit during the COVID-19 pandemic last year – with house prices and rents falling by double-digit figures.
The housing market, in line with the wider economy, is expected to recover this year, as market confidence is slowly improving again. There are more than 20,000 units to be launched in 2021. The Vietnamese economy managed a decent growth rate of 2.91% in 2020, despite the pandemic, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO), which makes Vietnam Asia’s top performing country in 2020 (although this is the country’s weakest performance in at least three decades). The IMF forecasts that Vietnam’s economic growth will accelerate to 6.7% this year, at par with annual average growth over the past two decades.