Nicholas Spiro

The View | Why it’s good news Asia’s property markets are more transparent

While multiple factors drive market booms, the advances in real estate transparency in Asia are significant and should not be downplayed

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The K11 Atelier building on King’s Road in Hong Kong’s Tsat Tsz Mui neighbourhood on September 2. Property markets across Asia are seeing benefits from marked improvements in their transparency. Photo: Bloomberg

Nicholas Spiro

Published: 4:30pm, 16 Sep 2024

What a difference four years makes. Every other year, JLL and LaSalle publish the findings of their Global Real Estate Transparency Index, a benchmark of market transparency in 89 countries and territories that assesses the legal and regulatory environment, availability of data and operating conditions across a wide range of geographies.

In the 2020 edition, the only Asian members of the top tier of “highly transparent” markets were Australia and New Zealand. In this year’s edition, the most transparent group also included Japan and Singapore. In fact, Asian markets showed the strongest improvements in transparency levels, with India emerging as “the top global improver” as its property industry becomes more institutionalised and the availability and quality of data improves.

Tier 1 cities in India and China are part of the second most transparent group of markets, along with Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam are classified as semi-transparent.

The main takeaway from the index is that transparency pays off, especially at a time when the global commercial property landscape is in flux because of far-reaching economic, technological, geopolitical and climate change-related changes.

There is a strong link between levels of transparency and investment activity. JLL notes that the 13-strong highly transparent group – which also includes the United States, Britain, and Germany – accounts for more than 50 per cent of income-producing real estate and more than 80 per cent of direct investment worldwide.

Although Asian markets, with the exception of Japan, are less mature and liquid, the region as a whole still constituted 26.8 per cent of the professionally managed global real estate investment market last year.