HONG KONG: China’s institutional investment in property overseas rose 17 per cent in the first six months of this year, with residential investment surging 84 per cent, said real-estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) yesterday.
London was the most popular destination for Chinese institutional investors, with a total of US$2.3 billion (RM7.3 billion), as efforts by the city to draw Chinese capital into major infrastructure projects spilled into residential and commercial markets, JLL said.
San Francisco and Chicago followed, with US$548 million and US$365 million, respectively.
Sydney was fourth, followed by Madrid, after China’s largest commercial developer Dalian Wanda bought a historic skyscraper in Spain’s capital city from the nation’s largest bank, Santander, for US$361 million.
“For first-time overseas investors, it makes sense to target the most liquid cities, but for the more experienced, looking at smaller and less liquid markets like Spain, where yields are higher but so are the risks, is a natural progression,” said JLL global capital markets research director David Green-Morgan in a statement.
Chinese real-estate outbound investment totalled US$5.4 billion during the period, with commercial investment contributing US$4 billion.
JLL noted that developers and insurance companies remained the most active investors, and while the interests mainly focused on core office and mixed-use development projects in global gateway cities, there was an increasing interest for hotel and hospitality products in popular Chinese tourist destinations.
Separately, on retail investments, the United States was most favoured by Chinese home buyers, according to Juwai.com, the largest real-estate portal that targets Chinese buyers looking abroad, based on inquiry data from the first half of this year. Reuters