Vietnam is rewriting real estate on two fronts at once — ownership rules and how every transaction gets tracked

Vietnam’s real-estate market is being reshaped from two directions simultaneously, and neither one alone explains what’s changing. At the top, a Communist Party resolution issued in late July sets the direction for rewriting the Land Law and Housing Law — including a possible shift away from permanent apartment ownership and new taxes aimed squarely at speculation. At the legislative level, National Assembly deputies spent 22 August debating the law that would govern every individual transaction — from a mandatory digital ID for each property to explicit new rules against price manipulation. Together, the two tracks point at the same goal from different ends: a market that’s harder to speculate in and easier to verify.

A top-down rewrite: Resolution 21 and the possible end of permanent apartment ownership

Resolution 21-NQ/TW, issued by the Communist Party’s Central Committee on 28 July 2026 to replace 2022’s Resolution 18, sets out the direction for amending Vietnam’s Land Law and Housing Law, according to an 10 August research report by MB Securities JSC (MBS) reviewed by The Investor. Among the priorities MBS flagged: resolving legal bottlenecks around land allocation and valuation, delegating more authority to local governments to speed up projects, tighter state oversight of land pricing, and — the detail with the most direct bearing on ownership — new rules on the usage periods of apartment buildings.

MBS’s own forecast, explicitly labelled as a forecast rather than confirmed policy, is that apartments developed under the new law could carry usage periods of 50 to 99 years, based on international practice, after which investors could pay a fee to renovate and redevelop. No specific regulation has been issued yet. Resolution 21 also raises the possibility of taxing profits from real-estate transactions and imposing higher taxes on vacant or unused properties — a direct move, MBS said, against speculative holding.

Investors are already repricing around the shift

MBS expects short-term demand for apartments with indefinite (rather than time-limited) ownership to rise before any new regulation takes effect, though it says the effect may be muted given already-elevated interest rates and investor caution. Over the longer term, MBS argues usage-period restrictions could make leasehold apartments less attractive to investors who prefer assets they can hold indefinitely — a shift that could push capital toward low-rise housing and land plots instead.

That reading lines up with a separate assessment from Avison Young Vietnam. CEO David Jackson told The Investor the market is moving away from high-growth expansion and toward “value creation,” with asset quality, operational efficiency and sustainable cash flow becoming the decisive factors — echoed in developers increasingly offering flexible payment terms rather than price cuts, and secondary-market sellers lowering price expectations under higher borrowing costs rather than holding out.

Every property gets a digital fingerprint

Separately, at a National Assembly plenary session on 22 August, deputies discussed a draft amendment to the Law on Real Estate Business that would assign a unique electronic identification code to real-estate assets, individuals and organisations covered by the law and by the Law on Housing — linked to databases tracking each asset’s development, ownership and transaction history, according to Tuoi Tre News. The draft covers existing and under-construction housing, most commercial and institutional buildings, and land-use rights within completed projects; property without a code could still be traded under existing rules, but once issued, a code would have to be used in all subsequent transactions.

Pham Viet Thuan, director of the Institute of Natural Resources and Environmental Economics in Ho Chi Minh City, told the assembly the code would let buyers verify an asset’s legal status and development history, reduce fraud such as the same property being sold to multiple buyers with forged documents, and — from a regulatory standpoint — help authorities track cash flows and under-declared transfer prices, and trace the origins of funds used in transactions.

Closing the loopholes — or not yet

At the same 22 August session, deputies also pushed to define real-estate market manipulation explicitly for the first time. Delegate Nguyen Khanh Vu proposed restoring two prohibited-conduct categories the draft law had dropped — improper use of brokerage licences and illegal fee collection — while delegate Trinh Xuan An proposed spelling out specific manipulation tactics for the government to police: fictitious transactions, false supply-and-demand signals, price collusion, and spreading false project or planning information to move prices. “The important thing,” Trinh said, “is not to criminalize or prohibit normal investment activities, but to have tools to deal with intentional acts that distort the functioning of the market.”

Buyer-protection rules drew similar scrutiny. The draft keeps the existing cap limiting deposits to 5 per cent of a property’s price, but several delegates — Nguyen Thi Yen Nhi, Duong Khac Mai and Nguyen Thi Viet Nga among them — argued the current draft actually weakens protections found in the existing law: it drops a requirement that projects still be within their approved implementation timeframe to qualify for sale, and drops the 15-day deadline for provincial authorities to inspect and respond to sale applications. Nguyen Thi Viet Nga specifically warned that regulating deposits by name rather than by function leaves a gap developers could exploit simply by renaming the payment. None of this is settled; it’s deputies flagging, on the record, where the government’s own draft still falls short before the law is finalised.

Zagdim’s View — Two changes here matter more than the headline “new rules” framing suggests for anyone holding or buying an apartment in Vietnam rather than land: the still-unconfirmed 50–99-year usage-period question, which MBS itself stresses is a forecast, not policy; and the mandatory transaction ID, which — once a property carries one — will make every subsequent sale, and the price actually paid, considerably harder to under-report than it has been.