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Sandy Li

Shanghai Forte Land plans to sell 500 million yuan worth of properties in Tianjin to finance expansion in the city.

The developer plans to replenish its land bank by adding 13.3 hectares of residential sites to its portfolio this year.

Shanghai Forte will release  a first batch of 45 luxury serviced apartments  in the 1.7 billion yuan Tianjin Centre in Hong Kong later this month, with other projects to follow in Singapore.

The units,  which will range from 45  to 250 square metres,  will be sold at 18,000 yuan per square metre.

The average residential price  in the core business district is 9,850 yuan per square metre.

'The restriction [on foreign investment in the property market] does not apply to Hong Kong buyers,' said Allan Pan, a marketing and sales director at Tianjin Forte Puhe Development, a subsidiary of Shanghai Forte.

Last month, the firm offered a Shanghai residential project  to investors in Hong Kong and Singapore, and sold more than 30 units at 70,000 yuan per  square metre, Mr Pan said.

The office-retail-hotel-serviced apartment Tianjin Centre at the  business district's Nanjing Road  has a 116-room luxury hotel, to be managed by Raffles, and 45,000 square metres of retail space.

Mr Pan said the company would sell 260 serviced apartments while the office and retail space  would be kept for long-term investment.He added that selling  all the 260 serviced apartments  would generate about 500 million yuan revenue for the group.

Tianjin Forte Puhe Development deputy general manager Lu Zhihong said the  revenue would be used to finance further expansion in Tianjin. 'We are in talks to acquire seven to eight residential sites in the urban and rural areas,' he said.

In 2005, the company paid 511 million yuan to acquire  Tianjin's then biggest distressed asset and later spent an extra 1.2 billion yuan  redeveloping it into  Tianjin Centre.

Daniel Yin, the managing director at CB Richard Ellis' Tianjin branch,  which is the sole agent for Tianjin Centre, said rent for serviced apartments was about US$25 per  square metre per month with an average occupancy rate of more than 90 per cent.



Shanghai Forte lines up sales worth 500m yuan