Overseas Property Investment: Affordable Housing for 2009

While the credit-crunch has crippled property price growth in almost every -- if not every -- country around the world, though there are some property types and regions that are still seeing growth, as a whole the world died around the end of Q3 beginning of Q4 2008. While this has been matched by the death of economic growth in almost all those countries, in some of the emerging markets, which saw the most spectacular economic growth during 2008, i.e. Cambodia and Vietnam, economic growth is expected only to slow.

In those emerging markets, during the boom this economic growth was creating more employment and increasing wages, which would lead to more of the local population buying their own homes. It still is leading to such things, and this means there is a lot of potential in the development of affordable housing, which tends to be in dire shortage in these emerging markets. It is likely developers will exploit this in 2009

During the boom, all developers wanted to make money from the craze of overseas investors flocking in to buy luxury off plan developments, but develelopers have now learned how quickly that these buyers can disappear, and are likely to focus on them a lot less in 2009. Affordable housing in emerging markets is therefore my clever investment for 2009.

That said, there are still some luxury off plan developments I would keenly invest in. The massive luxury resorts currently under construction on two Cambodian islands of the coast of Sihanoukville would get my cash every time. The islands are completely virgin, the Song Saa island resort