Bali holiday properties one-up each other with immense pools, cliffside rooms to woo bookings in travel-site age
- Tourism recovery and a legal shift that better incentivises owners to invest in their properties have sparked an upgrade frenzy
- With 10,000 vacation rentals to compete with, owners need new and visually arresting features to land on tourists’ shortlists
Voluminous rooftop pools and dramatic cliffside terraces are among the ambitious and social media-ready features that resorts in Bali are using to lure guests and investors amid a tourism recovery in the Indonesian vacation destination.
“Bali is rebounding from two years of Covid-19 pandemic and we’ve been seeing two impressive trends from the rental perspective,” said Jing Cho Yang, founder and CEO of Bukit Vista, which manages vacation properties in Bali and Yogyakarta.
The first is the pre-eminence of travel-booking sites, and the second is a legal shift that better incentivises owners to invest in their properties, he said. Add in eagerness to capitalise on the post-pandemic travel boom, plus the fact that Bali has an estimated 10,000 holiday rental properties competing to land on tourists’ shortlists, and it’s no surprise that properties are vying to outdo each other.
“Unique designs are rewarded more than commodity type looks,” Yang said. “This is a function of search engines like Airbnb and Booking.com rewarding more visually striking designs,” he said.
The rooftop’s “uniqueness and stylish photogenic design” will make it a “new icon of attraction”, a statement from the developer said.
Magnum Residence Berawa is a four-storey complex with more than 150 luxury apartments, situated along the coastal area of Canggu, a popular tourist location in Bali, close to Berava beach and popular beach clubs.
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The project offers one- and two-bedroom apartments with a minimum living space of 80 square metres (861 sq ft).
Meanwhile, luxury resort Ayana Segara Bali, which opened its doors to guests in November, is betting on its cliffside location, which allows its 193 rooms and four suites to offer indoor-outdoor spaces with private terraces and impressive views through large windows, according to a spokesman.
The rooms are designed to allow for “sweeping nature views at every moment”, an Ayana spokesman said.
Located inside the 90-hectare Ayana estate, the project also features the “largest indoor-outdoor pool in Bali”, he added.
The legal shift that has helped encourage owners to invest in their properties was a move from a complicated freehold scheme to leasehold titles.
“This has evolved the perspective of investment from capital gains to return on investment and cash-flow return,” said Bukit Vista’s Yang.
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Foreigners were formerly only allowed to own properties under a freehold arrangement whereby they were required to put up a company with capital of 10 billion rupiah (US$670,000).
“Ten years ago, the legal circumstances around foreign property investment were dodgy,” Yang said. “Most investors were steered into a ‘freehold’ right involving complex agreements with nominees, powers of attorney, mortgages, and inheritance rights. Since the market has shifted to leasehold, the legal situation is much more transparent and in accordance with the spirit of the law. There are very few frictions now.”
Investors are now “thinking less about their investment safety and more about their investment quality”, Yang said.
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Despite the good prospects of Bali properties as an investment, Kashif Ansari, founder and group CEO at proptech firm Juwai IQI, said profitability is mainly dependent on tourism.
“Bali was a very good investment until the pandemic put an end to a period of strong property-price growth, and we believe it will perform strongly during the tourism recovery of the next three years,” he said.
The number of visitors coming to the island increased 15 per cent year on year to 323,623 in February, according to government figures released earlier this month.
“Bali’s price growth turned positive in 2020, although real property prices, taking account of inflation, have been basically flat,” Ansari said. “Given that tourism is still recovering, one could hardly expect better. As Bali gets back to pre-pandemic tourism levels, the property market will continue to recover.”
