New regulation on the real estate market in Vietnam will allow foreign nationals to buy residences. The existing regulations in that field allowed individual foreigners only to lease residences for longer or shorter periods. New policy aims to provide more legal security for small foreign investors, and for those expatriated former Vietnamese who may decide to return to their and their parents' homeland. Given the nature of the political regime in place, officially a communist country, this move is one more step away from the communist taboos and, accordingly, one more step closer to the market economy.

A draft regulation will allow foreign nationals to buy homes in Vietnam, one of the last remaining officially communist countries in the world. The current regulation allowed only for shorter and longer leases of residential properties. The new regulation will not only allow foreigners to buy their residences, but also to convert, under some conditions, their long-term leases into property ownership. Pending for the new law to come into effect, the new long-term leases will be drafted with clauses allowing for such a shift.

Vietnam has gone a long way from completely centralized planning economy that existed until the end of the 1980s to the status of a market economy it enjoys nowadays. Inspired by the view of China rising fast in north, Vietnam has no time to lose in catching on with the market developments that occur in the entire region of South East Asia. Earlier this year Vietnam became the 150th nation to join the World Trade Organization. The foreign direct investments in Vietnam currently exceed the foreign investments to China. The economic growth is very close to what we can see in China, and for many years it keeps among the best performers in the world. The local population shows increasing interest toward capitalist-style development, and despite the war against the United States that ended in 1975, it shows no resentment of any significant magnitude toward visiting and residing Americans and other westerns.

Vietnam will be, without any doubt, the next regional star that will attract foreign interest in the coming years. Adopting export-oriented economic model that made rich South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, Vietnam will inevitably increase its trade dependence on foreign markets, especially the United States and Japan. It's too premature to predict any political change however. In fact, such changes may only halt the early pro-market development. The image of China today should be seen in this respect as of what Vietnam may look like in ten to fifteen years. A more prosperous, more industrialized, more urbanized, and more open to the world nation, facing the next political stage of its modernization.

Vietnam profile:

• Area: 329,560 sq km
• Population: 85.2 million (July 2007 est.)
• Population growth rate: 1.004% (2007 est.)
• Net migration rate: -0.4 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2007 est.)
• Life expectancy at birth: 71.07 years
• Total fertility rate: 1.89 children born/woman (2007 est.)
• Ethnic groups: Kinh (Viet) 86%.
• Languages: Vietnamese (official), English, French, Chinese, and Khmer.
• Literacy: age 15 and over can read and write (90.3%)
• GDP per capita: purchasing power parity $3,100 (2006 est.)
• Population below poverty line: 19.5% (2004 est.)
• Labor force by occupation: agriculture 57%, industry 37% and services 6% (2005 est.)
• Main trading partners: United States, Japan, China, Singapore.
• Internet users: 13.1 million (2006)

(Sources: CIA World Factbook 2007, Reuters)

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See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Vietnam.