Tuesday, November 9, 2010

91% of Asians surveyed want to buy property

Expect upward price pressure to continue until something drastically shifts sentiment.

Colliers: Asian property investors feeling good

91 per cent of Asian respondents to the survey said they wanted to buy property in their domestic region and 73 per cent of Asian respondents expect to expand their property portfolio over the next year. Shanghai followed by Hong Kong and Singapore were the most desired locations for commercial property investments over the next 12 months, while many respondents showed interest in second-tier Chinese cities like Hangzhou and Nanjing for residential investments.
The survey showed a strong desire in Asian respondents to invest outside of their home countries, with 59 per cent saying they wanted to buy property overseas as opposed to just 30 per cent of all respondents

It's time to start reviewing what happened last time, to find likely triggers. There is little agreement about what happened in 1997, but that does give us a menu of possibilities, one for every theory.

Wikipedia 1997 Asian Financial Crises
Other economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, have downplayed the role of the real economy in the crisis compared to the financial markets. The rapidity with which the crisis happened has prompted Sachs and others to compare it to a classic bank run prompted by a sudden risk shock. Sachs pointed to strict monetary and contractory fiscal policies implemented by the governments on the advice of the IMF in the wake of the crisis, while Frederic Mishkin points to the role of asymmetric information in the financial markets that led to a "herd mentality" among investors that magnified a small risk in the real economy. The crisis has thus attracted interest from behavioral economists interested in market psychology. Another possible cause of the sudden risk shock may also be attributable to the handover of Hong Kong sovereignty on 1 July 1997. During the 1990s, hot money flew into the Southeast Asia region but investors were often ignorant of the actual fundamentals or risk profiles of the respective economies. The uncertainty regarding the future of Hong Kong led investors to shrink even further away from Asia, exacerbating economic conditions in the area (subsequently leading to the depreciation of the Thai baht on 2 July 1997).[10]

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