In the past two years, Vietnam’s industrial property market has seen significant surges in occupancy rate and leasing prices.

CBRE Associate Director Pham Ngoc Thien Thanh said high leasing prices in several industrial parks in HCM City, Dong Nai and Long An, which went up 20-30% from last year, coupled with two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused significant difficulties to the market.

However, in Q3, investors and owners of ready-built factories offered many support policies to their customers, including reducing leasing prices and infrastructure maintenance cost by 10-30%, helping slow down growth of rental cost as compared to the last quarter.

With the pandemic’s impact, the ready-built factory and warehouse market has witnessed a cooled leasing price while the number of inquiries continues to rise in key industrial parks. It is expected that by the end of 2020, the total supply of ready-built factories and warehouses in the south will reach nearly 2.7 million square metres, up 28.3% year on year, Thanh added.

According to CBRE, the coronavirus pandemic also served as a catalyst for a stronger warehouse demand thanks to rapid expansion of e-commerce and backlog of goods. Leasing prices at new warehouses developed by foreign investors inched up 5-10% in the first three quarters from the same time last year.

CBRE forecast that developing cold and frozen storage warehouses will be the trend in the time ahead as fresh food distribution network is expanding nationwide.

Additionally, multi-storey warehouse is a good option for land constrained areas, helping e-commerce enterprises have larger storage space.