Vietnam’s Branded Residences Rise Echoes China’s Reform-Era Property Boom

Vietnam has overtaken every market in Asia to become the region’s largest branded residences market by value, at USD8 billion, ahead of Thailand (USD6.4 billion) and South Korea (USD5.8 billion), according to C9 Hotelworks latest research. The market represents 20% of Asia’s USD40 billion branded residences pipeline, which totaled 50,025 launched units in 2026, up 30.3% year-on-year.

The ranking marks a shift in stage, not scale. Vietnam trails Thailand on launched units, 12,592 against 13,124, but carries a larger total pipeline of 15,763 units across 47 projects, concentrated in the Upscale and Luxury tiers. The gap between total and launched supply points to a market still converting pipeline into delivered product. Thailand’s larger base of completed, operating projects reflects a longer-established branded residences sector with a deeper pool of end users. Vietnam’s higher value per launched unit, set against a smaller completed base, reflects earlier-stage investment demand rather than an established resale and rental market.

The trajectory has a precedent. China’s Reform and Opening Up, launched in 1978, and Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms, launched in 1986, both moved closed economies toward market-oriented systems through state-directed policy rather than gradual liberalization. In both cases, government investment in ports, highways, and energy grids preceded and enabled the arrival of foreign direct investment and manufacturing capacity, rather than following it.

Both governments also directed large-scale movement of rural labor into urban industrial hubs, and in China’s case, that urbanization pipeline became a primary driver of the property cycle that followed. Vietnam’s current infrastructure program, including Long Thanh International Airport and a planned Ha Noi to Ho Chi Minh City high-speed railway ahead of its 2027 APEC hosting year, follows the same sequencing.

Supply is concentrated accordingly. Da Nang leads Vietnam’s branded residences market by units (3,034), followed by Ho Chi Minh City (2,903), which is also home to the country’s first non-hospitality branded residences project, The Rivus by Elie Saab. Ha Noi is Vietnam’s largest urban market, predominantly Luxury tier. Of Vietnam’s 47 projects, 83% are co-located with a hotel, and 4% are standalone, a structure closer to Thailand’s hotel-anchored model than to a stabilized, developer-led residential market.

Whether Vietnam’s property cycle scales to the magnitude of China’s remains open. The policy and infrastructure sequencing driving it is not.

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