Street Scene, originally uploaded by rico!.
It’s Nyepi Day — Bali’s Day of Silence. If you’re not familiar with this wonderful tradition, here’s a link to a good little piece in the IHT (though it’s a year or so old).
I’ve also posted some photos of last night’s Ogoh-Ogoh in Seminyak if you wish to have a look.
The Elite Havens Group, one of Bali’s best known brand names, has opened a new sales office in the fashionable Oberoi district. The move comes on the heels of the group opening a new dedicated sales website and signals what appears to be a more aggressive market stance from the luxury market leader.
“We’ve had a great year, but our operation has always suffered a bit from a low profile office,” states Matthew Georgeson, head of Sales at Elite Havens. “We’re more visible in this area and expect both a boost to our brand recognition and to our walk-in traffic.”
The new office, sporting a colonial style and a wide veranda, is located on the same street as competitors Paradise Property, Exotiq, C151, and virtually next door to new-comer Royalty Property. “We’re known as a luxury brand. In line with that the Oberoi office is the largest and most prestigious in the area. We’ve made a real effort to distance ourselves from the competition,” noted Georgeson.
Visit them in Oberoi at 18c Jalan Laksmana or online at www.EliteHavensSales.com
The long dormant Villa Forum website has been at last re-born: now as a luxury villa directory. The site provides a free listing service for owners or management companies who want to publicize their villas. No registration, no fees.
The domain has been around for a while and is indexed everywhere, so that means a listing there will give you another relevant in-bound link for your website, which should also give your search engine rankings a bit of a tweak. Pretty straightforward and easy way to give your marketing a boost.
Try it out at http://www.VillaForum.com
The last several years have witnessed a significant increase in development, particularly relating to vacation villa housing. The trend continues and indeed is strengthening. Some commentators have speculated that there are as many as 40 multi-unit villa developments on the books which will add hundreds of bedrooms to the inventory on the market. Now add to that number, probably by a factor of 2x or 3x, the stand-alone villas under construction and you start to get a good idea of the feeding frenzy we’re seeing at this moment.
When is enough? How much is too much? People are starting to ask these questions, but I have to wonder whether the are even the right questions…
Initially let’s take a crack at the validity of the numbers. While the property marketeers are out there flogging at least 40 developments, the reality of the situation sees perhaps only 2 dozen viable projects. Of those two dozen, only a portion actually have spades in the dirt. The development game loves to sell off the plan, when at all possible. That invariably means some plans never materialize due to changing market conditions, lack of interest, etc. The point being: Don’t let the commercial multi-unit developments number fool you. We’re not anywhere near the lunacy one observes in places like Phuket.
Next, let’s factor out the hotels who have jumped on the villa bandwagon and are constructing villa-type accommodations under their hotel brands. These units just don’t come into this analysis — these are hotels, people! The hotel market is a thing unto itself with market characteristics that are distinct from the villa business. (Arguably some of the multi-unit complexes passing themselves off as villas are hotels, too, but that is a topic for another post!)
On the subject of the individual villas under construction, one must keep in mind that this is not a coherent market. Individual villa construction is driven by private owners who exhibit a wide range of motivations, from pure investment to pure whimsy. Generalizing about the individual villa market is fraught with peril. About the best one can safely say is that some of these villas will enter the commercial market — and that’s a slim reed from which to hang any meaningful trend analysis. Their impact on the market long-term, in other words, is extremely hard to predict.
The potential for over-development is a threat primarily in two key areas: burden on infrastructure and the environment, and impact on the market. In the next couple of posts I will take a look at both these topics.
Stay tuned…
Rainy season typically arrives in Bali in November and lasts until April or so. This year, however, it seems to be dragging in here later than usual. This is a mixed blessing: Without the rains, Bali is rather more hot than usual. The gap between dry season and the beginning of the rains is generally agreed to be the least pleasant time of the year. (Mind you, we’re splitting hairs here as Bali weather at its worst is still better than many places!) However, despite the heat, there is one dramatic upside: Rainy season brings the most spectacular sunsets imaginable. I don’t know what it is, the region’s volcanoes spewing detritus into the air, or simply some change in the atmosphere, but whatever the cause we get sunsets in glorious technicolor. I send people photos, they think I’ve spent hours in PhotoShop making them this sexy. Nope. It’s just Bali…naturally beautiful.
