Yanlord pauses construction on Shanghai projects; property management staff on frontline

ALTHOUGH the lockdown in Shanghai is expected to affect the operations of Yanlord Land Group in the short term, the Singapore-listed, Chinese property developer intends to speed things up when the restrictions ease, it said in response to The Business Times' (BT) queries.

Shanghai's local government on Sunday (Mar 27) announced a 2-stage lockdown over a 9-day period to conduct a mass testing blitz, after Covid-19 cases spiked in the financial hub.

A Yanlord spokesperson said: "We believe the lockdown will affect the overall daily lives of the citizens in Shanghai and so as to our operations."

Offices and construction sites are required to be closed - from Mar 28 to Apr 1 for Pudong, and from Apr 1 to 5 for Puxi - while the company's general management teams and sales teams must work from home, she noted. "Property management teams are working on the frontline to support the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test arrangements."

When the city reopens, Yanlord plans to increase the number of working shifts to catch up on the development pace at its projects, just as it had done in 2020, the spokesperson told BT.

"Since it normally takes around 2.5 years to 3 years to complete the construction of a development, we are confident that we'll be able to gradually catch up on the development pace under the short-term lockdown," she added.

Yanlord has ongoing developments and operations in multiple Chinese cities. Its Shanghai residential projects include Yanlord Arcadia, which will have 1,171 units across 16 towers, in the Puxi Yangpu district, as well as Poetic Villa, which will have 745 units, in Pudong. In January 2022, the developer sold out all the units it had released during the month for both projects: 226 apartments under the second batch of the launch at Yanlord Arcadia, and 514 at Poetic Villa.

The company has also implemented an online platform for some project launches and pre-sales in various cities, such as the projects in Hangzhou and Suzhou, the spokesperson said. Customers will pre-register for launches and submit documents for pre-verification, before they enter the platform at their allocated time slots to select from the available units, register their purchases and pay the deposits online. Formal sale and purchase agreements will then be signed at Yanlord's sales centres or designated locations, by appointment, to minimise physical contact among customers and salespeople.

"Since there have been on-and-off, small-scale Covid-19 outbreaks in various cities in China over the past few months, our local management teams have been monitoring the construction progress closely to adopt the necessary measures to ensure the construction, pre-sales launch and delivery of the properties as scheduled," the spokesperson told BT.

She added: "We hope (and expect) the lockdown to be temporary and the new outbreak in Shanghai to be contained quickly under the intensive PCR tests, self-testing, quarantine and other measures being implemented by the Shanghai government."

The mainboard-listed shares of Yanlord were trading at S$1.25 as at the midday break on Tuesday, unchanged from the previous close.

BT has also reached out to other Singapore-listed property firms with projects or assets in Shanghai for comment on the lockdown.

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