APAC hotel capital is concentrating in five safe-haven markets

Across Asia Pacific, hotel investors are not scattering capital evenly. They are clustering around a small group of reliable destinations that offer depth of buyers, sensible lending, credible data, and clear exit paths. JLL’s mid-year read puts first-half hotel transactions at about US$4.7 billion, a decrease of roughly a quarter from a hot 2024 base. The headline is not the pullback. It is the concentration. Around 84 percent of closed deals landed in five places: Japan, Greater China, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea. That is where buyers and sellers are still meeting each other without heroic assumptions, and where underwriting can rely on more than sentiment.

The clustering has a simple logic. After two years of uneven recovery, investors prize markets that translate travel demand into believable cash flow and that let an owner trade when the business plan is done. Japan and Singapore illustrate the point from different angles. Japan is running on record tourism and supportive domestic finance. Singapore is running on governance, disciplined new supply, and a very deep universe of REITs and private wealth that keeps liquidity alive even when year-on-year comparisons look soft. The rest of the region is hardly shut, but deal committees are asking for more evidence, which slows timetables and widens bid-ask gaps in smaller or more opaque markets. You can see this in the mid-year write-ups as well as in the way second-half pipelines are framed: more closings expected, but still centered on the same five markets that already accounted for the lion’s share of volume.

Japan’s demand machine keeps doing the hard work

Japan has become the region’s cleanest fundamental story. Monthly arrivals are hitting new highs, and they are doing so through weather hiccups and headline noise. In July 2025, the country welcomed about 3.43 million foreign visitors, a record for that month, pushing the seven-month total to nearly 25 million and keeping the country on a record annual pace. International coverage has repeated the same core facts from the Japan National Tourism Organization: the weak yen continues to support long-haul travel and to broaden the visitor mix beyond near-neighbor markets. The spending side matters too. Tourism receipts have been large enough to rank among Japan’s leading “export” categories, which is the kind of macro anchor lenders pay attention to when they decide how comfortable they feel with hotel cash flows. Put plainly, rate holds up when the country is this busy, and financing follows the data.

This is not about chasing a fad. It is about understanding how many of the levers that lift hotel profit in Japan are working in the same direction. Long-haul leisure continues to grow, domestic travel has found a post-pandemic rhythm, and airline capacity is back in most gateways. Operators have been able to rely on rate more than occupancy to defend RevPAR, and the mix in key cities now includes a healthy layer of experience-led spend in food and beverage and wellness. That combination supports underwriting even if wage inflation and staffing remain tight, because the demand signal is broad and not confined to a single event cycle. When you read the month-by-month coverage of arrivals and compare it with the visible queue of buyers in Tokyo and Osaka, it becomes clear why Japan sits at the top of JLL’s leader board for first-half deal value.

Singapore’s normalisation still comes with liquidity

Singapore is having a different year, and that is fine. After an exceptional 2024 powered by events and a controlled supply pipeline, some 2025 hotel metrics have eased from very high bases. STR’s regional update notes that Singapore saw a slight retreat in April compared with March, even as it continued to post some of the region’s highest occupancy and ADR.

The Singapore Tourism Board’s STAN portal and SingStat datasets tell the same broad story: arrivals and hotel indicators look healthy on an absolute basis and continue to move toward pre-pandemic norms, with the agency guiding 2025 full-year arrivals toward the high-teens in millions after a strong 2024. What matters for investors is that the city’s buyer universe has not gone anywhere. A dense network of REITs, family offices, and institutions remains active, which means owners can still find depth at exit if they present clean governance, sensible capex, and a product that earns its keep without relying on one-off spikes.

The five-market map at a glance

The numbers below are helpful because they make the concentration tangible. JLL’s mid-year breakdown shows who actually wrote cheques in the first half. Japan led. Greater China, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea followed. Everything else combined made up the remainder.

Market	1H 2025 hotel deals (US$)	What the flow is telling us
Japan	1.5 billion	Record travel demand and lender comfort support rate-led NOI and financeable stories
Greater China	744 million	Selective buyers target city tiers with clear corporate and domestic leisure demand
Australia	664 million	Scale, professional operators, and a rebound narrative are drawing capital back
Singapore	546 million	Liquidity and governance keep exits visible even as metrics normalise
South Korea	504 million	Deep domestic capital, strong Seoul gateway dynamics, and improving regional demand
All other APAC	758 million	Smaller, slower, or more opaque markets are seeing longer diligence and wider bid-ask

Figures are JLL first-half estimates compiled from mid-year media reports that cite the firm’s Hotels and Hospitality team.

Why this tilt is not likely to reverse quickly

Capital flows do not drift back to the middle of the map just because a calendar page turns. The same ingredients that concentrated deals in the first half are still in the bowl for the second half. Demand growth is uneven across the region, project finance costs remain above pre-pandemic levels, and many owners still face catch-up renovation cycles. That cocktail rewards markets where the operating line is predictable and where the buyer universe is deep enough to keep pricing anchored. JLL’s commentary points to a busier second half as backlogs clear. There is no suggestion that the safe-haven tilt disappears. It reads more like a continuation of a simple investment truth: depth plus data plus debt equals deal velocity.

Japan in practical terms

If you zoom into the street level, the national averages turn into a set of practical observations that any owner or investor will recognise. Tokyo’s key corridors are sustaining high weekend leisure and solid weekday corporate traffic. Kyoto and Osaka have converted their international buzz into reliable shoulder-season occupancy, and Fukuoka and Sapporo continue to benefit from diversified demand that is not hostage to a single airline or tour operator. Lenders have adjusted to this rhythm. Bankers who were cautious in 2022 now have two years of post-reopening operating data and a clear view of how rate can carry RevPAR without constant discounting. In that context, refurbishment programs become easier to finance, and the business case for adding a more sophisticated food and beverage or wellness offer becomes less theoretical. None of that eliminates cost pressure in housekeeping or maintenance, or the challenge of sourcing bilingual management talent. It simply means the profit engine has enough torque to handle the climb. The record arrival prints through summer make that very hard to argue with.

Singapore in practical terms

Singapore rewards order. Hotels that are tight on labour scheduling and strong on channel discipline continue to convert revenue to cash even as the city comes off last year’s event highs. The reason investors keep circling is not mystery. Policy is steady. Data is clean. New supply is measured. The buyer base is wide. When owners present a product with clear guest mix logic, a tidy capex profile, and metered environmental performance that can flow straight into a REIT’s reporting template, due diligence tends to shorten rather than stretch. That is why mid-year coverage can show softer month-to-month metrics while the city still holds its place in the safe-five. It remains a market where an exit is a process rather than an adventure.

What to watch between now and year end

Japan’s monthly arrivals will keep setting the tone. If the pace through autumn and winter holds, owners in Tokyo and Osaka will have a very strong story to tell about rate resilience, and that usually shows up quickly in buyer behaviour. Singapore’s dashboards will continue to normalise, and the interesting piece to watch will be how corporate travel balances with a fuller event calendar as the year closes. On the capital side, keep an eye on how quickly second-half backlogs clear. JLL’s expectation is that a stronger closing cadence will lift full-year totals above 2024, which would confirm that the first-half softness was about timing rather than appetite.

Mymland take

This concentration is an opportunity to keep our storytelling simple. We can use Japan’s record travel and Singapore’s liquidity to anchor one or two clean dispositions in the next cycle, while we keep building experience-rich, operationally disciplined product that buyers in those cities already know how to price. One paragraph is enough because the path is straightforward: prove the cash flow, keep the capex tidy, and sell into depth when the window opens.