Exchanging at the online seminar ‘Real Estate in a Vortex of Uncertainty: Turn and Adapt’, which was organised by BizLIVE Corporate Life on the morning of August 4, experts had shared about investment activities in the current period when the economy was deeply affected by the Covid-19 epidemic.
Accordingly, experts believed that the current situation was very complicated with great risks, in which the Covid-19 pandemic had a great impact on all fields. Van Luc, a finance and banking expert, admitted that at this time, there were many attractive investment channels, notably the gold investment channel.
Even with Decree 24 strictly regulating the gold market, previous speculative waves were limited, but many investors still poured their money into gold, especially in the recent strong upward trend. Since the beginning of the year, the world gold price had increased by 27%, while the domestic precious metal price had also increased by 29%. However, there were still opportunities in three areas related to real estate, said Can Van Luc.
The first was an opportunity to develop industrial real estate through the transfer of investment from abroad into Vietnam. The second was logistics, as in a new report, Savills rated Vietnam as one of the three most attractive markets in Asia for logistics. The third was the demand for more affordable housing which was still very high, Luc analysed.
As the head of a research organisation, Can Van Luc said, it was estimated that currently, about 60.65 percent of investors’ money was still in savings, expecting inflation of four percent at an interest rate of six percent, so there still had positive yields. Accordingly, savings was still a popular choice.
Agreeing with the opinion of Can Van Luc, the deputy Secretary-General of the Vietnam Real Estate Association, Nguyen Van Dinh, also said that investors should not use financial leverage to invest, especially when the market fluctuated too abnormally as currently.
As for real estate, there were two profitable factors. Firstly, real estate always increased in price, with the level of increase, according to research data for many years, ranging from five percent to seven percent per year. This was clearly more beneficial than saving money. Besides, investors could exploit the property for rent, so there always had the opportunity to generate income. Of course, real estate also had risks, whatever had better profits also had higher risks, Dinh analysed.
However, Luc also noted that as an investor, where to put money depended on risk appetite. Some investors were afraid of risk like the older generation who preferred saving channel or divided the money into many pieces. As for risk-accepting investors, there would be other investment options.
This expert advised investors to diversify and risk a bit. Many investors liked to surf and use quite large financial leverage, even borrow from shadow banking, when the market went down, they might go bankrupt, lose capital, Luc emphasized.
There were many attractive investment channels. Real estate was always a medium and long term investment channel. Along with real estate, Luc said that the stock market was also an attractive channel. However, this channel required investors to monitor the market closely and to brainstorm.
