The pattern of foreign property investment in Vietnam: The apartment market in Ho Chi Minh City Sanghoon Jung * , Du Huynh, Peter G. Rowe Department of Urban Planning and Design, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 48 Quincy Street 325, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Keywords: Ho Chi Minh City Foreign investment Investment pattern Apartment Peri-urbanization abstract As globalization proceeds, transnational property development is increasing. Especially in emerging markets, foreign developers’ influence in changing the local landscape is becoming significant. In this research, the behavioral patterns of foreign developers in the apartment market of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam were identified. To understand the dynamics of foreign developers, the types of products that were being created, where the investments were located, and the differences in development strategies adopted by foreign developers in comparison to domestic counterparts were identified. To accomplish this, data on apartment projects and statistics were collected, and a series of spatial analyses including sieve mapping, histogram analysis, factor analysis and logistic regression was conducted. In addition, closer examination was made of specific cases to understand the dynamics among foreign and domestic developers, also allowing the identification of some regularities in the patterns of foreign developments. Besides presenting detailed results, this paper also seeks to account for the conditions that appear to have generated these patterns and characteristics. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction As globalization proceeds, transnational property developments have increased significantly. The freer movement of capital, facili- tated by deregulation, policy reforms, and a movement toward greater global trade integration, coupled with improvements in communication and transportation technology, developers from one country can readily implement projects in another. Especially in emerging markets, the influence of transnational investments in changing the local landscape is becoming more significant. Accordingly, there have been some researches on where foreign investments locate and why they chose to locate in those places when they entered the particular market. The locational patterns of finance and producer services by foreign investment have been especially studied for several cases. For example, Grant and Nijman investigated the geographic distribution of foreign companies in finance and producer services in Accra and Mumbai and found that market forces drove foreign companies to be spatially segregated from domestic counterparts within city centers (Grant, 2001; Grant & Nijman, 2002). In the case of manufacturing ventures, Wei et al. argued that investment policies of the local government are the most important factor accounting for the locational behavior of foreign ventures in their investigation of Nanjing (Wei, Luo, & Zhou, 2010), and the similar explanation also applied in Hangzhou (Wei, Leung, Li, & Pan, 2008). Compared to these sectors in which foreign investors typically have comparative financial and technical advantages over the local players, the housing markets in emerging economies are generally an exception, mainly because foreign companies are unable to penetrate the markets as easily as their domestic counterparts. Foreign companies may have more sophisticated construction techniques and access to finance, but domestic firms have the advantage of possessing a better understanding of the local resi- dential culture, lifestyle, climate conditions and so on. They are also more competitive in terms of cost reduction, having a strong business network and a familiarity with the local legal process. Therefore, the tension between foreign and domestic companies is more likely to be conspicuous in the housing market, and a different approach is thus required to for its analysis. However, the manner in which foreign property developers behave when they enter a new market, vis-à-vis their products and strategies with a focus on housing type, remains an under-studied area. While there have been substantial case studies (e.g. Chen, Wang, & Kundu, 2009; Douglass & Huang, 2007; Huat, 2011; Percival & Waley, 2012; Shatkin, 2011) about the properties developed by foreign developers dealing with the driving forces and mechanism of investments in specific cases, spatial segregation * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 917 548 5319; fax: þ1 617 495 0446. E-mail addresses: saj916@mail.harvard.edu (S. Jung), duhtvn@gmail.com (D. Huynh), prowe@gsd.harvard.edu (P.G. Rowe). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Habitat International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/habitatint 0197-3975/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2012.11.003 Habitat International 39 (2013) 105e113