Property Business Likely To Grow Further This Year

[george]

Property business likely to grow further this year

BANGKOK: -- The property business is expected to continue to grow this year although housing loans will not grow significantly like that of last year due to higher interest rates, according to the Real Estate Information Center.

Pongsak Chivarat, the center’s director, said licenses for construction of residences in 30 strategic provinces were given to 196,303 units last year, down 9.7 per cent from the previous year.

Of this, 3,131 are high-rise buildings, up 69 per cent, 39 are office buildings, up 50 per cent, 17,830 are commercial buildings, up 3 per cent, 1,016 are buildings for a hotel purpose, up 6 percent, and 2,882 are buildings for an industrial and factory purpose, up 6 per cent.

Loans extended to project owners totaled 28.59 billion baht, down 38 per cent from the previous year. Fund-raising through issuance of debentures totaled 22 billion baht, up 51 per cent.

This year, he said, the property business is projected to continue to grow with the housing supply expanding at least 10 per cent.

In the January-February period, licenses were issued for land allotment for a residence purpose to 4,102 units from 34 projects in Greater Bangkok.

Most are single houses, townhouses, twin houses, commercial buildings and vacant land respectively.

Land areas in which investors are interested to invest are located in Pattaya and Sri Racha in Chonburi and Phuket.

Laddawan Thanatanit, Executive Vice President of Bangkok Bank Plc, said the extension of housing loans for this year would not grow considerably like that of last year.

She conceded people were concerned with the upward interest trend. However, houses with a price of lower than three million baht remained of interest to potential buyers.

--TNA 2006-03-31