Bindoa Blog

Yesterday, the 2009 CNBC Asia Pacific Property awards were held in Singapore and it was announced Bindoa.com had won ‘Best Property Portal’ for Hong Kong. The site received a 4 star award in recognition of our achievement (you can see our winner’s banner on the homepage as proof!)

We at Bindoa.com are excited and happy to have won this award. We feel it is well deserved after the time and effort we have put into developing the site. We do believe Bindoa.com offers a valuable service to its users searching for real estate in Hong Kong. Not many countries, let alone a place as small as Hong Kong have a real estate aggregator site that puts thousands of listings into one easy to find place. Therefore, we hope you enjoy Bindoa.com and it helps you to find your next piece of real estate and if not, drop us an email at askralph [at] bindoa dot com and tell us how we can improve!

We haven’t posted in a while here at Bindoa.com, but we thought it would be worthwhile telling you about our award in the ‘Best Property Portal’ category in Hong Kong!

The award is part of the Asia Pacific Property Awards and is part of the International Property Awards. Bindoa.com has definitely won an award but will have to wait to see whether it will be a top-scoring winner at the event, in which case Bindoa.com will be put up against other winning companies from Europe, the UK, the Americas and Arabia to find the ultimate World’s Best in each category.

The Awards will be presented at a gala dinner to be held at the Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore on 16 July 2009.

At Bindoa.com we’d like to thank you for your continuing support and is grateful for the opportunity to be recognised as one of the best property portals in our region. We will continue to work hard and provide a better and alternative solution to online property search in Hong Kong.

Cheers!

This week we were playing around with the Bindoa search function and decided to try and find the best of the best on Bindoa.com. By searching ‘Hong Kong Island’ and sorting the results by highest price, we were able to view some of the most expensive properties in the world, let alone Hong Kong!

While there were many to choose from we decided to go for this prestigious property located on the Peak. Titled ‘Kelletteria’ this property boasts 3000+ sq. ft, 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms as well as sweeping views of the South side Pokfulam Sea. Pretty rare and special in Hong Kong. Well done to Savills as well for posting some decent pictures too!

[View with PicLens]

See the original proeprty listing page here: http://residential.savillsproperty.com/main/PropertyDetail.aspx?refid=96229

Hi everyone,

Just to clarify the post below was an April Fools joke. Gotcha!

Ralph

Here at Bindoa.com we have some big news to share with you! Please read the excerpt below to find out what we’re talking about:

Transmosco Investments and Business Development Inc, a Singaporean company with a technology investment arm focused on Internet-based Asian technology companies expanding into Asian marketplaces has acquired Bindoa.com, for USD$5 million.

Bindoa (Where is it) provides information, advertising and listing services to Hong Kong’s growing online real estate sector. Bindoa’s primary revenue is generated by online display advertising on the Bindoa.com website.

Since it’s launch in September 2008, Bindoa has successfully become a significant player in the rapidly growing infrastructure for online listings. It has become an essential service to many vendors in the vertical, who use it as part of their strategy for marketing listings to attract more customers.

Transmosco Investments CEO David Brentwood said Bindoa provided an attractive entry point into China, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, allowing their existing platforms to leverage core capabilities into a larger, faster growing and less mature market that Singapore, with high performaing, internationally experienced local management.

The announcement came as Transmosco Investments sold off its interest in Newlifax Print Publishing Group, to Linear Market Services Limited for $215 million, recognising a profit on the sale of approximately $56 million.

We at Bindoa.com are naturally ecstatic and believe this acquisition is a step in the right direction for online property search in Asia. Thank you to everyone who has supported the site and keep checking back to see the development of Bindoa.com around Asia!

To follow up our post yesterday about the Hong Kong real estate market, we’ve included two links from the Rating and Valuation department in Hong Kong.

The two links below show Rental indices and Price (sale) indices going back to ‘97. Make your own opinion on where the market is going!

Rental indices by property type

Price indices by property type

The original Government webpage can be found here.

Enjoy!

This post will highlight a roundup of links to news articles/blog posts relating to the Hong Kong real estate market. I did a search on Google, Google Blogs and Twitter to see what articles I could find and posted links to them below. I’ve also provided a brief summary for each article for your quick perusal.

Jones Lang LaSalle Hong Kong - March 2009

Says several projects were launched in February with prices in line with the secondary market and those projects were well-received. The secondary market remained slow but prices had appeared to have stablised due to banks being more willing to lend and mortgage rate spreads widening. In regard to leasing the report stated,

Leasing for top-end market remained slow while the mid-tier market benefited from some downgrading demand, keeping activity at brisk levels.

Hong Kong Property Monitor Monitor March 2009

Propertywire.com Article - 19 March 09

Reports the Hong Kong property market is beginning to ’stabalise,’ quoting Henry Cheng (MD - New World Development). Says that strong affordability, low interest rates, tight supply should help the residential market and increased mortgage availability in recent months has helped.

Original Propertywire.com article

Expat Daily News Blog Post - March 20, 2009

Interesting article looking at the potential opportunity to invest in HK property given the current economic conditions. Highlights the fact limited supply of housing availabiliy will ensure demand while falling prices and low interest rates make it an attractive market for the investor. States that, ”the main sentiment dominating the overall Hong Kong market is currently one of expectation as potential investors wait for prices to fall further before they commit to a purchase.”

Original Expat Daily News article

NuWire Investor Article - March 09, 2009

Concise article covering all sectors of the Hong Kong property market based on Pricewaterhousecoopers, Colliers International and CB Richard Ellis reports. States that residential sector is slowing in particular due to loss of jobs in the financial sector, however serviced apartments are still performing very well with strong rental yield growth and low vacancy rates. Suggests 2009 is a good year to hold property.

Original NuWire Investor article

Colliers International, The Knowledge Report - Jan 2009

Published in January 2009, this report gives a market overview of the office, luxury residential, industrial and retail sectors in Hong Kong. (As this post relates to residential property, I’ll just give an overview of the luxury residential sector ). The report focuses on Q4 and states that the luxury sector decreased by 22% QoQ in November 2008. Colliers predicts residential rents and capital values will fall by 15% and 20% respectively. However, positive market signals might emerge when local banks start adopting less restrictive lending policies.

Original Colliers International - The Knowledge Report

While doing a search for rental properties in Midlevels Central (between $20,000 and $30,000) we came across this listing from Century 21. The property itself is over 1000 sq. ft and has a large loft-styled space with high ceilings. Rental is $20,000 which may seem cheap, but is probably due to the fact that the property is a ‘home/office’ meaning its likely to be in a commercial zone. Still, could be a cool space to live in and make your own… Plus it’s on Wyndham Street!

[View with PicLens]

To see the original listing, click here.

According to Bloomberg, rental prices in Hong Kong are beginning to feel the effects of the global financial crisis.

Indeed, it looks like tenants are now in the driving seat as home rental prices are now beginning to drop significantly due to the slump in the housing market. January capped off 6 straight months of decline according to Centaline with leases in Hong Kong Island falling as much as 24 percent in January, mainly due to job cuts in the financial sector.

It seems as though rental prices are subject to the same problems of high unemployment and negative growth, meaning it might be a good time to negotiate that prospective lease or lease renewal!

According to Simon Lo at Colliers;

“If you have the same budget as last year, you can get a place that is at least 30 percent bigger and you definitely have more choices,”

With that in mind, see if you can you find any potential bargains on Bindoa.com and let us know by quoting the link of the property below.

To read the full Bloomberg article, click here.

Hi there!

First let me start by saying welcome to our little website in the great city of Hong Kong! Usually vertical real estate search engines are created for big real estate markets such as the US or the UK, due to the fact that the nature of such sites allows for millions of data to be aggregated into one central place to make it easier for you to access information. This in turn makes it easier for you to find the right property to buy or rent.

We at Bindoa.com thought it would be fun to see if we could start our own property search engine for Hong Kong. Despite there only being a relatively small number of real estate sites to search, we found the whole process of searching online very frustrating. So what did we do? We got to work and 6 months after we began development, voila - we launched our site and what started out as a small experiment has now become a fully-fledged operational property search machine!

So, are you not sure where to start your online real estate search in Hong Kong? Tired of the overly-complicated search tools and poorly presented property portals? Well, if you are then try our site out and let us know what you think.

All our data is gathered from the leading estate agents of Hong Kong, including some of the big guys such as Midland Realty, Hong Kong Homes, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Savills as well as some boutique agencies such as Iglu Property Consultants, Qi Homes and Netproperty. (Disclaimer: we are not an agent or broker and don’t take any commissions from any real estate transactions).

Go ahead and try out the site and come back soon to check our blog to see what’s going on at Bindoa.com.

Ralph

Founder, Bindoa.com