Housing market is now cooling rapidly, as slower economic growth in Mainland China, as well as the civil unrest in Hong Kong, is hitting Macau’s gaming and property sectors. The fallout from the fast-spreading COVID-19 adds another blow to Macau’s already ailing economy. The average transaction price of residential units fell by 2.33% during the year to Q2 2020, following y-o-y declines of 2.26% in Q1 2020, 3.04% in Q4 2019, 3.66% in Q3 and 2.99% in Q2. Quarter-on-quarter, house prices increased 1.32% during the latest quarter.
Demand is now plummeting. In Q2 2020, residential property transactions in Macau fell by almost 28% to 1,971 units from a year earlier, following a 23.5% drop during 2019, according to Macau’s Financial Services Bureau. Likewise, the area and value of residential property sales also plunged about 20% and 25%, respectively. Macau’s economy is struggling, with real GDP contracting by a whopping 67.8% year-on-year in Q2 2020, following annual declines of 48.7% in Q1 2020, 8.1% in Q4 2019, 4.4% in Q3, 2.2% in Q2 and 3.8% in Q1, according to Macau’s Statistics and Census Service (DSEC). The total number of visitor arrivals plummeted 86% y-o-y in the first 7 months of 2020 to just 3.34 million, from the previous year’s 23.81 million, mainly due to travel restrictions implemented by various countries to mitigate the spread of the virus, according to DSEC. As a result, Macau’s gaming revenues in Jan-Jul 2020 plunged 80% to MOP 35.1 billion (US$ 4.4 billion) compared to the same period last year.