US President Donald Trump and Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-Un met in Singapore on 12 June. kirkchai benjarusameeros/Shutterstock
Diplomatic talks have seen this little-known Chinese town enjoy a boom in interest.
Amidst yesterday’s historic summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore, a developer from the city-state is cashing in on a residential realty project hundreds of miles away in the hermit kingdom.
The 2,400-unit Singapore City condominium project saw its strongest sales yet in six years in the run-up to the highly anticipated meeting on Tuesday (12 June), Reuters reported.
The development is in the Chinese city of Dandong, the site of fiery home price increases attributed to Kim’s overtures to Beijing and Seoul over the last few months. The city lies by the Chinese-North Korean border.
The firebrand American leader landed in Singapore on Sunday night ahead of talks with Kim that could presage the end of the nuclear stand-off between the US and North Korea. Trump had cancelled the summit last month.
More: Inter-Korea summit sweeps this Chinese border town into real estate frenzy
Unit prices in Singapore City now hover at around CNY6,000 (USD940) per square metre, up from CNY4,000 per square metre in 2015.
Kim’s announcement in April that North Korea would begin a tentative process of denuclearisation in pursuit of economic growth had an immediate effect on demand for Singapore City. By May, the project moved 587 units, four times sales in April, according to TC Koh, group managing director of developer Brothers (Holdings).
“Suddenly everybody came in. From that time onwards we started selling 30-40 units a day,” he said.
After breaking ground in 2008, the project saw sales of less than a hundred units per annum in the last five years.
Koh is looking forward to a positive upshot from the summit. “If it’s a failure then we’ll have a problem. All the investors will run away,” he told Reuters.
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