Property Hunter Magazine Property Hunter Magazine Issue 54 - May 2014 | Page 73

Chinese Overseas Buyers Are Rational Despite MH370 Incident Singapore and Malaysia Closing in on Train Link in the former country organise concerted boycotts of products from the latter, which hit its automotive sector hard. Still, analysts believe the effects will not be permanent. Kuala Lumpur International Airport Growing acrimony in China over Malaysia’s handling of the MH370 crisis could jeopardise Chinese buyers’ appetite for property development here, according to the Wall Street Journal. The news comes as rancour in Beijing over the Malaysia’s continued inability to find the missing Malaysia Airlines plane that carried 153 Chinese nationals among the 239 people on board has already torpedoed the Visit Malaysia Year 2014 promotions in the country. Families of the Chinese passengers on the doomed flight and their countrymen became hostile towards Malaysia following its announcement on March 24 that satellite data showed the plane “ended somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean”. The absence of physical evidence of the flight led some families to label the Malaysian government “murderers” for implying that all those aboard were dead.. “For now, marketing homes in Malaysia is going to be a bit awkward. It’s just like how we don’t market homes in Japan to Chinese customers,” an anonymous Beijing-based real estate consultant told the WSJ. But the expected drop-off will not only hit Malaysian property developers; Chinese real estate firms who invested heavily in the market here could now end up with lots for which they might find fewer buyers. One such firm was Guangzhoubased Country Garden Holdings, who began venturing into the local property market via Johor Baru in 2012. Sales in its Country Garden Danga Bay project there last year reached roughly 7 billion yuan (RM3.7 billion), and was the firm’s biggest sales contributor. “The (MH370) incident has brought some negative impressions of Malaysia (and the) Malaysian government, and we do not preclude the possibility ѡ