Once known to the public as a grand tourism real estate project, CocoBay had made its striking impression to the market at first, but soon went into difficulties for not having the due construction permit for almost two years.
Coupled with the unresolved legal framework governing the condotel model that CocoBay has adopted for its projects, the difficulties have mounted up even more. When the project could not be carried out and no sales generated as homebuyers were rather cautious with the condotel model. CocoBay has ended up in severe cash flow problem.
As the talented young management team was somewhat overwhelmed with these issues, the burdens were then passed on to the senior personnel like Nguyen Duc Thanh, chairman of the Empire Group – the very owner of the CocoBay Danang project.
Thanh has officially returned to operate the project since July 2018 to detangle each of the difficulties and problems arose. He was rather confident to bring the project back to life.
The legal issue was possibly the biggest one and this was solved thanks to the change in the planning of CocoBay, which modifies the original condotel model into an urban area and the high-rise buildings into residential and low-rise structures. The project has also received its use of land rights and is expecting to gain its construction permit this May to kick off the construction progress.
The change in the project planning, as Thanh said, is necessary to address the issues related to the operation of such large-scale project in reality. As initially planned, CocoBay would have up to 12,000 hotels rooms, but when 2,000 of these were completed and put into operation, the difficulty in operation and management started to show up.
In fact, Vietnam has not had any 5,000-room resort complex being put into operation at this stage, let alone a project of 12,000 rooms like CocoBay.
Reducing the construction density with more low-rise buildings instead of high-rise ones was therefore the only solution.
In addition, part of the condotel project under construction was converted into apartments to avoid legal concerns over the condotel model. As a result of changes, apartment and landed-house buyers at CocoBay can gain land use right or ownership certificates.
The project has also added other facilities into its master planning, like the management office, schools, health clinics, community houses and commercial centres.
Another important change in the project is the construction timeline that will see the project being completed two years earlier than the original plan.
Target customers of CocoBay has also been expanded to the East Asia nations like Japan, Korea and China, instead of focusing on the EU and US markets as previously.
Revamping the management team of CocoBay, together with refreshing its media plan and establishing a customer care unit, are also the very changes that Thanh and his project team have brought up to revitalise the CocoBay project.
“As soon as these five changes are implemented, CocoBay will be turning into a new page of life, with change in both quality and quantity. The standard of the project has also been set on a higher rank,” said Thanh.
