Beijing's property market to remain attractive for foreign investors in 2020

Foreign investment into Beijing's property market will probably grow further after a record-high transaction volume in 2019, industry experts said.

"With many opportunities still being chased and deals under negotiation at the end of last year, we expect the strong investment activity from 2019 to carry into 2020," said Michael Wang, head of Capital Markets for North China at JLL in Beijing. "Even during these challenging economic times, Beijing has remained a reliable and attractive investment destination due to its strong fundamentals, and we expect this to continue to shine through in 2020."

Beijing saw a record transaction volume of around 80 billion yuan ($11.7 billion) in 2019, more than doubling the number of 2018 (38 billion yuan) and tripling the number of 2017 (25 billion yuan), statistics from JLL show.

According to Grant Ji, head of capital market, CBRE Northern China, starting from 2018, the foreign investors were much more active in Beijing because of the favorable exchange rate and open investment policies.

"It is a window of opportunity for them to enter the market. We've seen some foreign investors increasing their allocations in China market because of the global uncertainty of politics and economics," said Ji. "We saw increasing attention from foreign investors in 2019 and we believe the trend will continue in 2020."

According to Savills, an international real estate agency, the en-block deal in 2019 were largely concentrated in key cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The en-block deals in the country's first-tier cities accounted for 71 percent among all the transaction volumes, and 40 percent of the capital was from overseas, reaching a record high in the past five years.

Those international funds attach more attention to potential investment opportunities in the long run, and they are more reasonable about the investment return with the economic growth slowdown, according to Savills' report.