Knight Frank launches Vietnam arm with focus on commercial real estate

GLOBAL real estate adviser Knight Frank has set up a joint venture (JV) in Vietnam to provide services including brokerage for office, industrial and logistics property, capital markets and investment property, as well as consultancy and research.

Based in Ho Chi Minh City, the entity - Knight Frank Vietnam Property Services - will be led by its newly appointed managing director Alex Crane, who is also the JV partner for the new operation, and director of capital markets Ben Gray.

The team plans to work with local and foreign owners, occupiers, investors and developers in all aspects of commercial real estate in Vietnam, particularly Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

In a press statement on Thursday (Feb 17), Knight Frank noted that the South-east Asian country's real estate market is experiencing rapid growth with substantial foreign investment inflows despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

The London-headquartered property consultancy said: "Vietnam's key position in global supply chains has helped propel local service industries, leading to industrial land prices rising by an average of 8 per cent per year and the fast-growing office market maintaining around 90 per cent occupancy in Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi."

It added that prime residential real estate also remains robust, with the average sale price of apartments in Ho Chi Minh City increasing 19 per cent year on year to US$2,800 per square metre.

Kevin Coppel, managing director for Asia-Pacific at Knight Frank, sees Vietnam as "an attractive market with promising fundamentals - a young, well-educated population, strategically located for the region's supply chains, enviable economic growth, growing private wealth, and an increasingly important market for our international clients".

Alistair Elliott, senior partner and group chairman of Knight Frank, noted that the consultancy has expanded its footprint over the last 125 years to service the markets where its clients need it to be.

"Vietnam is becoming an increasingly important centre in Asia-Pacific real estate markets," Elliott said.

Crane, a long-term resident of Vietnam, has worked in the country since 2011, after having started his real estate career in the UK in 2003. He has assisted Knight Frank on a number of their global client accounts in Vietnam in recent years.

Prior to opening the latest JV office, Crane was most recently the managing director of another global real estate consultancy and brokerage in Vietnam.

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