One-Third of Sihanoukville's Unfinished Towers Are Now Revived — Here's the Actual Survey

This article updates and sharpens the numbers in our earlier coverage of Preah Sihanouk’s $72 million investment pipeline, which estimated the province’s stalled-building caseload from a different, broader incentive dataset. A dedicated government survey, reported the same week, gives a more precise picture — and a genuine resolution rate.

For years, the standard way to describe Sihanoukville’s unfinished-tower problem has been visual and anecdotal: rows of grey concrete skeletons along the coast road, hotels and casinos abandoned mid-construction after the 2019 online-gambling ban and the pandemic emptied out the financing and the workforce behind them. What has been missing is a hard count — how many buildings, exactly, and how many have actually come back to life. A June 2026 government survey, reported in late July, finally supplies both numbers.

The Survey, and the Number

Im Sokthy, Head of the Secretariat of the Investment Promotion Working Group in Preah Sihanouk province, disclosed the results of a joint survey conducted in June 2026 by the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction and the Provincial Administration. The survey identified 428 investment projects involving 468 unfinished buildings — the most precise official count of Sihanoukville’s stalled-construction inventory published to date, and larger in project terms than the 216-project figure this platform derived from the province’s broader incentive statistics in our earlier coverage.

The two figures are not contradictory — they come from different exercises. The 216 figure represents the subset of all 491 incentivised projects since 2024 that relate to stalled buildings; the 428/468 figure is a dedicated physical survey specifically targeting unfinished-building inventory, conducted in June 2026 by land-management and provincial authorities working together. The survey-based number is the more authoritative count of the underlying problem’s true scale, precisely because it was designed to measure that scale directly rather than being a byproduct of incentive-programme bookkeeping.

Of those 428 projects, Sokthy reported that 128 have been resolved — 33.8%. “This is the result of our continued efforts and the close cooperation of the provincial administration,” he said, while acknowledging the remaining roughly two-thirds require continued work.

What “Resolved” Actually Means

It is worth being precise about the resolution definition, because it is more permissive than “finished and occupied.” A project counts as resolved once construction resumes, the structure is repaired, or the property reopens for business. That threshold captures early-stage revival — a hotel that has restarted renovation work, or a building that has reopened with partial occupancy — alongside fully completed projects.

This is not a criticism of the methodology; a resumption-based definition is a reasonable way to measure momentum in a market where full completion of a stalled high-rise can take years even under good conditions. But it does mean the 33.8% figure describes the share of stalled projects that have re-entered active status, not necessarily the share that are now generating revenue, housing tenants, or contributing meaningfully to Sihanoukville’s built environment. The gap between “resumed” and “finished and performing” is exactly the detail worth tracking as this data series continues.

The Incentive Behind the Number

The primary financial lever driving revival, according to Sokthy, is a property tax exemption for unfinished-building projects — extended through the end of 2028 by a decision of Prime Minister Hun Manet. That extension matters more than it might initially appear: a tax exemption with a near-term expiry creates urgency but also risk that projects rush completion or, more likely, that owners without near-term capital simply let the exemption lapse and remain stalled. A four-year runway to 2028 gives owners genuine time to secure financing, resolve legal or partnership complications, and restart construction at a realistic pace, rather than forcing a binary decision under a tight deadline.

The working group has paired the tax incentive with regular forums between the provincial administration, the working group, and affected investors — a structured, recurring communication channel explaining the incentive programme and facilitating the administrative procedures (permits, inspections, registration) that a stalled project typically needs to navigate before construction can legally resume. This is consistent with the broader pattern of specific, named administrative fixes this platform has also seen in Cambodia’s July 2026 national land-titling reforms — a government increasingly attempting to solve property-sector bottlenecks through targeted procedural fixes rather than blanket announcements.

Who Owns the Remaining Two-Thirds

Sokthy’s disclosure that the majority of stalled-project investors are Chinese, alongside Cambodian, Israeli, and Japanese investors, is a useful data point for calibrating how quickly the remaining 66% might resolve. Chinese investors who exited Cambodia around the 2019 gambling ban and subsequent pandemic disruptions face a genuinely different set of obstacles to restarting than a domestic Cambodian owner does — capital controls, changed personal circumstances, altered risk appetite toward Cambodia specifically, and in some cases, the practical difficulty of managing a Cambodian construction project from abroad after years of disengagement.

This suggests the 33.8% resolution rate likely reflects the “easier” cases first — projects where the owner remained engaged, reachable, and financially able to resume once the incentive and administrative support were in place. The remaining projects plausibly include a higher concentration of harder cases: absent owners, legal or ownership disputes, or genuinely abandoned capital. If that reading is correct, the pace of resolution should be expected to slow rather than continue at the same rate, even with the incentive extended to 2028.

The Security Context

The revival numbers were disclosed alongside remarks from Preah Sihanouk Provincial Governor Mang Sineth on the province’s ongoing crackdown on online scam operations — the compounds that proliferated in some of the province’s vacant buildings during the years when construction sat stalled and oversight was thin. Sineth described large-scale scam compounds as having “largely disappeared” from the province, while acknowledging operators have relocated into smaller premises: rental houses, guesthouses, and in some cases buildings disguised as restaurants or clinics.

This context is directly relevant to the revival story, not incidental to it. Vacant, unfinished buildings have been a documented enabling factor for Cambodia’s online-scam industry — empty structures with minimal oversight offering exactly the kind of low-visibility premises scam operations have used. A rising resolution rate on stalled buildings — construction resuming, structures reopening for legitimate business — mechanically shrinks the pool of vacant space available for illicit occupation, even though that is a secondary effect of the incentive programme rather than its stated purpose. Conversely, the persistence of roughly 300 still-unresolved projects means the underlying vulnerability has not been eliminated, only reduced.

Reading This Against the Broader Sihanoukville Recovery Thesis

Taken together with this month’s other Sihanoukville news — the new submarine cable landing aimed at supporting SEZ and BPO competitiveness, and the province’s continued industrial-sector resilience even as national tourism arrivals fell nearly 48% year-on-year — the stalled-building revival data reinforces a consistent picture: Sihanoukville’s recovery is real, incremental, and running well behind the pace that would be needed to call the post-gaming transition complete. A one-third resolution rate on a survey-confirmed inventory of 428 stalled projects is genuine progress. It also means two-thirds of the identified caseload — plausibly the harder two-thirds — remains unresolved, with a 2028 incentive deadline now the operative timeline to watch.

What This Means for Anyone Evaluating a Sihanoukville Asset

For a buyer, investor, or lender evaluating a specific unfinished Sihanoukville property today, the survey data reframes the right diligence question. It is no longer useful to ask generically whether Sihanoukville’s stalled-building problem is being resolved — the answer is a qualified yes, at roughly a one-third rate on the confirmed inventory. The more useful question is which third a specific asset falls into: has this particular project’s owner already engaged with the working group’s incentive programme, or does it sit among the harder, still-unresolved cases where the original investor is disengaged, disputed, or gone.

That distinction is discoverable. The provincial Investment Promotion Working Group holds the survey data and the incentive-application records, meaning a specific building’s status — resumed, still stalled, or never formally surveyed at all — is, in principle, a question the working group’s secretariat can answer directly, rather than something a buyer has to infer from a drive-by inspection of visible construction activity. For anyone seriously evaluating a distressed or unfinished Sihanoukville asset, confirming that status directly with the working group, rather than relying on a seller’s or agent’s characterisation, is now a concrete, available step — one this survey has made possible in a way it was not before the June 2026 count existed.

What to Watch

• The pace of resolution in the next reporting cycle. If the rate holds near a third per survey period, that is a healthy trajectory. If it slows materially, that would confirm the remaining projects are disproportionately the harder cases — absent owners, legal disputes, or genuinely abandoned capital.
• The gap between “resumed” and “completed.” Future disclosures that break down how many of the 128 resolved projects are fully finished versus merely under renovation would meaningfully sharpen this picture.
• Whether the 2028 tax-exemption deadline produces a late rush of revivals as it approaches, or whether owners who haven’t moved by 2027 are effectively permanent write-offs.

Sources

• [S-896] Khmer Times — One-third of Sihanoukville’s unfinished projects revived (29 July 2026) — the June 2026 MLMUPC/provincial survey identifying 428 projects and 468 unfinished buildings, the 128-project (33.8%) resolution figure, the property tax exemption extended to 2028, and the investor-nationality breakdown.
• [S-897] Research Cambodia — Preah Sihanouk’s $72M Project Pipeline — And the 216 Stalled Buildings Behind the Bigger Number — our earlier analysis using the province’s broader incentive-programme statistics, now sharpened by this dedicated survey.
• [S-898] Research Cambodia — Sihanoukville Location Guide — the province’s boom-bust cycle and the broader post-gaming recovery context.