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Days after Cyclone Nargis ravaged Myanmar’s Irrawaddy region, a quake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale struck China’s Sichuan province, felling buildings and shaking high-rise offices in cities as distant as Thailand’s Bangkok and Vietnam’s Hanoi.

“I can’t imagine the latest events are going to put a major halt on Asian property transaction volumes or the level of cross-border investment in the region,” said Mark Callender, head of international property research at Schroders, whose $321 million International Selection Property Securities Fund was around 27 per cent invested in Asian stocks as on March 31.

“Long-term, the opportunities are still there. Markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore might look close to their peak, but places like Tokyo and Seoul are only halfway up,” he said.

Asian commercial property transaction volumes rocketed 27 per cent to $145 billion in 2007, on the back of an 87 per cent rise in foreign investment to $73 billion, according to property services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

China was one of the world’s top 10 markets for deal volumes last year, leapfrogging more mature markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore for the first time. Investment volumes were expected to rise again this year, as global funds ramped up allocations to the region.

ING Real Estate, one of the world’s biggest property fund managers, and a leading player in China’s burgeoning residential market, said it did not expect international investment or domestic occupational demand to be severely affected by the quake. “We see no reason for a decline in the strong demand for mid-tier residential housing in both the Chengdu and Chongqing provinces and in China as a whole,” said Richard van den Berg, ING’s Chinese Country Manager.

“Some slowdown is expected in the immediate aftermath, but we expect that the sales momentum will recover when Sichuan province returns to normality,” he said.

Standard Life Investments Property Fund Manager Andrew Jackson said property team members did weigh up the prevalence of natural disasters when assessing an area, but such studies had limited bearing on investment decisions.

“We are aware of the risks and there are certain areas we would be cautious about investing in because of vulnerability to cyclones, quakes or flooding,” Jackson said.

British house prices are likely to fall five per cent this year, and many analysts predict they could tumble twice as much, as soaring consumer inflation restricts the scope for further interest rate cuts.

A Reuters poll of 30 economists, analysts and fund managers showed they expect property prices to slide further after recording their first year-on-year falls in more than a decade.

Forecasts for 2008 house prices on a full-year basis ranged from a 10 per cent fall to a 2.9 per cent rise, with a median prediction of a 5.0 per cent drop, according to the poll which was taken May 8-14.

Nearly a third of the respondents — nine of the 30 — predicted a 10 per cent drop.

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