JAKARTA, Indonesia — Gita Wirjawan, Indonesia’s trade minister, made a steeply rising motion with his right hand, like an airplane soaring into the sky, when asked about the surging real estate market in this country. “Scary, isn’t it?” he said.
But Boediono, the vice president who uses only one name and has been a leading economic policy maker for the last 16 years, was much more sanguine.
“I don’t see so far that the cycle has developed a dangerous bubble,” he said in a separate interview. “We have taken steps, of course, but if you look at the players, they are well insulated.” He did not expect that even a recent plunge in the country’s currency would present financial troubles.
Mr. Boediono and Mr. Gita represent different perspectives in an active discussion here over whether Indonesia’s resurgent commercial and residential real estate markets are a cause for jubilation or concern. High rents and prices, at least compared to previous levels in Jakarta, have been the subject of particular scrutiny because real estate helped cause a financial collapse in the late 1990s and because the currency has been one of the hardest hit among emerging markets in recent months.
Rents per square foot for downtown grade B commercial real estate have roughly doubled in local currency terms over the last three years and nearly tripled for scarce grade A space. They have not yet shown signs of weakening, real estate brokers and developers said, even though investors have shifted tens of billions of dollars from emerging markets to the United States and other industrialized countries in response to somewhat higher long-term interest rates there.
But while skyscraper construction projects are slowing or stopped in big Indian cities like Mumbai, tower cranes in Jakarta are still floodlit at night so that workers can keep building long after sunset. The difference reflects continued foreign investment in the Indonesian economy and a diversified domestic economy.
The Lippo Group, the sprawling conglomerate that is one of Indonesia’s largest real estate developers, is still planning to begin preselling offices in two commercial real estate projects in the coming months, which will then take about three years to build. “At this stage, there’s no material evidence the market has gone away,” said Craig Williams, who was the managing director overseeing Lippo’s real estate operations until the end of September.
While Jakarta real estate prices may be rising, they are doing so from a very low base and remain among the cheapest in East Asia. Even after recent appreciation, the rule of thumb here is that condominium prices, at $372 to $418 per square foot, are one-seventh of comparable prices in Singapore and a tenth of comparable prices in Hong Kong, according to the Jakarta office of Cushman Wakefield, a global real estate consultancy and brokerage firm.
Commercial real estate prices are seven times higher per square foot in Singapore than in Jakarta and 14 times higher in costly Hong Kong.
Bank lending to real estate has been heavily regulated ever since the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998. Bank Indonesia, the country’s central bank, now requires commercial banks to get down payments of 30 percent for residential mortgages. Banks commonly demand 50 percent down payments for commercial mortgages, and many demand additional collateral beyond the project itself.
“Now we are more fully in control of bank loans to real estate,” said Difi A. Johansyah, the central bank’s chief spokesman and chief liaison to parliament and the rest of the Indonesian government.
Like London, Tokyo or Paris, Jakarta is a huge metropolis that combines the roles of being the political capital and commercial capital of the country. With 10 million residents plus 2.5 million people who commute in from the suburbs, it is the dominant commercial real estate market in the country, and is also emerging as a market for apartment towers. But demand is outstripping supply because of other limitations imposed on the commercial real estate market.
Fragmented land ownership also makes it hard for developers to accumulate land to put up skyscrapers. Indonesia also does not allow foreigners to own land, and makes it extremely difficult for them to obtain the main type of land lease used for buildings. Foreigners qualify instead for a kind of junior land lease known as “right of use.” Banks are loath to accept buildings with these junior leases, known as hak pakai, as collateral for mortgages.
Mr. Gita, the trade minister, who is also campaigning for the ruling party’s nomination in next summer’s presidential elections, said he personally favored liberalization of rules for foreign investment in real estate. “We can learn from countries that have opened up that sector,” he said.
But the front-runner by a wide margin in early polls for the presidential election is the governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo. He has established himself as a populist since taking office a year ago, partly by limiting the issuance of high-rise construction permits, a process sometimes tainted by corruption over the years.
Mr. Joko banned in September the construction of any more shopping malls. There are only 173 sprinkled across greater Jakarta, many of them small and rather basic, but they are seen as a threat by merchants in numerous traditional outdoor markets.
American financial institutions most conspicuously missed out on Indonesia’s real estate price spiral of the last several years. They acquired none of the top 27 Class A commercial projects in Jakarta even as they snapped up buildings in other Asian markets, said Todd Lauchlan, the head of the Indonesia office of Jones Lang LaSalle. Indonesians own over 99 percent of the country’s overall commercial real estate market, although there are a few investors from Europe, Japan and Hong Kong, notably Hongkong Land, part of the Jardine Matheson Group.
“It is one of those markets where one needs to have patience and build strong relationships with local partners,” said Robert Garman, the executive director responsible for Southeast Asia at Hongkong Land.
American companies have been more successful in industrial real estate, notably multinationals with long-term goals of selling to Indonesia’s 250 million people. Procter & Gamble acquired a large site here at the bottom of the market several years ago for a diapers factory.
Roughly 85 percent of the offices in Jakarta and 95 percent of the condominiums are occupied by their owners, who almost never want to sell, said David Cheadle, the managing director for Indonesia at Cushman & Wakefield, another global real estate brokerage and consulting firm. “We’ve pretty much seen one private equity fund, one sovereign wealth fund and one institutional investor every month, every 10 days even, and we say to them, ‘It’s a very frustrating market here,’” he said. “You can’t just walk in here and buy an office building.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/business/international/real-estate-heating-up-in-indonesia.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
