The average land price is US$3,000 per square meter.

In mid-March 2015, the HCM City Infrastructure Investment JSC (CII) met with investors to talk about its projects in Thu Thiem new urban area.

CII plans to pour capital to develop infrastructure items in the area, in exchange for which, it will have land for Maria Bay and Thu Thiem Lake View projects covering a total area of 84,255 square meters.

CII’s general director Le Quoc Binh said international real estate funds have been hunting for land in Thu Thiem, considered the ‘golden land’. CII’s land plots in the area, therefore, have also caught the special attention from foreign funds.

“We have made an offer for a land plot at high price to explore the situation and found that foreign investors are not afraid of high prices. They would be willing to invest if they can have clean land in advantageous positions,” he said.
The businessman has found that foreign investors now have the cash worth hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, which allow them to make payment at any time for land.

On March 2, Keppel Land, the investor from Singapore, signed a conditional investment agreement to obtain 40 percent of stake in Empire City, the developer of a multi-storey project in Thu Thiem. 

The value of the deal, as Keppel Land has revealed, is $93.9 million.

The other partners in Empire City joint venture are Vietnamese owned – Tien Phuoc, Tran Thai – and Hong Kong-based investment fund Gaw Capital Partners.

Prior to that, another super project named Thu Thiem Eco Smart City, capitalized at US$2 billion and developed by the Republic of Korea's Lotte Group, was announced.

The project is expected to turn the area into the most modern financial, trade and service center in the region. Lotte has made a deposit of VND2 trillion to develop the project to be kicked off in 2016.

Huynh Phuoc Nghia from GIBC, a consultancy firm, confirmed that many foreign investors, especially ones from Asia, have been quietly hunting for land in Thu Thiem since October 2015.

The investors are only interested in cleared land with the area of one hectare at minimum which has good infrastructure connection with the central region. 

Most of the investors have enough capital to implement projects and they can arrange capital within 5-7 years, the time equal to the life span of one real estate project.

“Capital is flowing out of China, and Thu Thiem is a potential place for the capital flow to go,” he said.