Vietnam Real Estate Debt Rises to 15-Quarter High

Much of the increase was concentrated in a handful of large names. Vinhomes alone added more than 50 trillion dong of debt, accounting for about 82% of the sector’s quarterly increase, while Novaland lifted borrowings by more than 4 trillion dong. That concentration suggests the pickup in leverage is being driven by the strongest developers with access to funding, rather than a broad-based easing across the industry.

The structure of that debt also points to a change in how the sector is funding growth. Long-term debt rose to 67.3% of total borrowings from 63.1% in the prior quarter, indicating more money is being used for project development and staged disbursements rather than short-term liquidity cover. That is healthier than a pure roll-over story, but it still leaves developers exposed if sales recover more slowly than expected.

The funding mix is increasingly reliant on both banks and bonds. SSI Research said several lenders with room to expand credit — including MB, VPBank, HDBank, Techcombank, TPBank and VIB — boosted real estate lending in the second quarter by 22% from the previous quarter. At the same time, the bond market staged a strong rebound, with real estate accounting for 128.2 trillion dong, or 46.5%, of first-half corporate bond issuance. In the second quarter alone, developers sold 102.4 trillion dong of bonds, up 228% from a year earlier.

That revival is not coming cheap. Average bond coupon rates for property issuers were about 11.4% in the second quarter and 11.3% in the first half, with some deals priced as high as 13.5%. For investors, that underscores a simple trade-off: developers can secure liquidity, but only by paying up for it, which will keep pressure on margins and cash flow unless project sales accelerate.

The risk is that leverage is building across multiple channels at once. S&I Ratings expects real estate bond maturities to top 156.5 trillion dong in 2027, up 16% from this year, which raises the stakes for refinancing in a high-coupon environment. That is where the bull and bear cases diverge. Bulls will point to stronger project execution, a healthier backlog and BSC’s view that profits for covered developers could rise sharply in 2026 and 2027 as sales reopen. Bears will focus on uneven bank access, legal bottlenecks and the danger that higher debt simply postpones pressure into the next refinancing cycle.

For investors, the key question is not whether the sector can borrow — it clearly can — but whether the borrowed capital is turning into cash-generating inventory fast enough to absorb the rising cost of leverage. The developers with the best land banks, cleaner legal status and stronger presales should capture the recovery first. The rest may find that a higher debt-to-equity ratio is less a sign of confidence than a warning that the rebound is still fragile.