Who Is Still Building? Cambodia's Counter-Cyclical Developers

Cambodia’s property downturn has a visible face: stalled towers, quiet sales galleries, developers who have gone silent on delivery dates. It also has a less visible one — a smaller group of developers who are doing the opposite. They are pouring foundations, signing bank partnerships, and opening sales offices in the same months that competitors are mothballing sites. Some of them are saying, on the record, that this is deliberate. In June 2026, the CEO of Time Square developer MegaKim World Corp told local media that “due to the international economic situation… some developers have stopped working. For our company, this is a good time to make the market more active.” That is not spin from a PR team trying to talk up a weak market. It is a specific claim about why building now makes business sense, and it is worth taking seriously enough to test.

This piece looks at who is actually building through the downturn, what their stated logic is, how it holds up against the numbers, and — because “still building” is not automatically a green flag — what separates conviction from a pre-sale treadmill a developer can’t get off.

The backdrop: a real, not imagined, downturn

Nothing here argues the slump is fake. Cambodia pulled in a reported $5.1 billion in foreign direct investment in 2025 and the wider economy added roughly 400,000 jobs, healthy headline numbers for a small open economy absorbing a Thai border conflict and US tariff uncertainty. But the World Bank’s own reporting through the first half of 2026 kept describing a prolonged property-sector downturn specifically — construction permits down, condo absorption slow, and a national stock of stalled towers, concentrated on the coast, that has become the sector’s most visible symbol. Phnom Penh condo supply roughly tripled from about 20,000 units in 2019 toward a projected 85,000 by 2027, while prices sit 15–20 percent below their 2019 peak. That is the environment every developer discussed below is building into, not around.

So when a developer says this is “a good time to make the market more active,” they are not disputing the downturn. They are making a claim about relative position within it.

The case for building through the slump

Three separate arguments show up across the developers actually doing this, and they are worth separating because they are not the same argument.

Land and construction costs fall in a slump. When competitors pause, contractors and material suppliers who would otherwise be fully booked have spare capacity, and site owners under pressure are more willing to negotiate. A developer with cash — or an existing bank relationship — can lock in a lower cost basis than they could have during the boom years, and that lower basis carries through the entire project’s economics even after the market recovers.

Less competition for buyer attention. In a crowded launch calendar, a new tower competes with a dozen others for the same shrinking pool of qualified buyers. When most competitors have stopped launching, a developer that keeps marketing has the sales floor closer to itself. This matters more in a market like Phnom Penh’s, where occupancy has bifurcated sharply between well-managed prime buildings running in the high 80s percent and generic mid-tier stock struggling in the 70s — attention and brand trust are scarce resources, and scarcity favours whoever is still visibly active.

The delivery clock runs years, not months. A tower launched in 2026 typically delivers in 2028–2030. A developer building today is not selling into today’s depressed absorption; it is selling a pre-sale contract against a delivery date several years out, betting the market it delivers into looks better than the market it is launching in. That is a real bet — Cambodia’s property cycle has been wrong-footed before — but it is a coherent one, not a denial of current conditions.

None of these arguments is unique to Cambodia; counter-cyclical building is standard real-estate strategy everywhere prices are volatile. What makes it worth writing about here is who is actually able to execute it, because the strategy only works for a developer with the balance sheet to survive the years between “we broke ground” and “the market recovered.”

Who is actually doing it

Time Square / MegaKim World Corp. The clearest public statement of counter-cyclical intent in this cycle came from Time Square’s own CEO. MegaKim is a Taiwanese developer that has been building in Phnom Penh since 2011 and has four completed, occupied towers to show for it — Time Square 1 through 3 and 5, spanning BKK1, Toul Kork, and delivering through the COVID and post-boom years that stalled many competitors. That is a genuinely rare credential in this market: completed deliveries through a prior downturn, not just through a boom. Against that record, the company is now running an unusually aggressive simultaneous pipeline — five projects at once, including a 45–50-storey tower near the Russian Market and a first entry into Sihanoukville with an Otres Beach project. The scale escalation is the thing to watch: towers that were 17–30 storeys when completed are being followed by a pipeline pitched at 45–50 storeys, and running five pre-sale projects in parallel is meaningfully more simultaneous exposure than the completed track record was built on. The Sihanoukville move is its own separate bet, taking a Phnom Penh-proven formula into the market with the country’s worst completion history. Time Square’s counter-cyclical logic is credible — the delivered towers back it up — but the size of the current bet is larger than the size of the evidence behind it.

Orkidē Development. Orkidē grew over roughly a decade from a single gated borey project into a group now working on a 200-hectare mixed-use master plan, Villa Orkidē / The Botanic City in Chroy Changvar, alongside its established The Royal and The Royal Condominium community in Sen Sok. In June 2026 the company struck a mortgage partnership with Foreign Trade Bank (FTB) — a financing-side move, not a construction one, but one that matters for the same reason: it widens the pool of buyers who can actually close on a unit at a moment when credit is tight and flagship mortgage rates for buyers sit around 8 percent in USD with conservative loan-to-value caps. Pairing an aggressive land-bank expansion with a bank-partnership push to ease buyer financing is a coherent counter-cyclical pairing — it addresses both sides of the transaction (supply and the buyer’s ability to pay) at once. Orkidē’s public story is still mostly self-told, though, and a buyer weighing any specific phase should verify project-by-project status rather than take the master-plan scale at face value.

The broader borey segment. Beneath the headline condo-tower names, Cambodia’s landed-housing developers as a class have been the most consistently active builders through the downturn, because borey demand is substantially domestic and driven by genuine household formation rather than foreign or speculative capital. That segment doesn’t generate the same press-release moments as a 50-storey tower launch, but it is the quieter, structurally sounder version of the same counter-cyclical logic: build where the underlying demand hasn’t actually gone anywhere.

What stalled looks like, for contrast

The counter-cyclical story only makes sense against its opposite. Sihanoukville is the country’s starkest case: hundreds of unfinished towers — estimates run from roughly 360–400 in the downtown core to considerably more province-wide — left standing mid-construction since the pre-2020 Chinese capital pullback, against a government revival programme whose approved funding remains largely undeployed years later. Some of that stalled coastal real estate has since been identified in US Treasury sanctions actions as converted into scam-compound operations, which is its own separate and serious due-diligence issue, not a reason for optimism about restart.

Phnom Penh has its own quieter version: developers who simply stopped announcing timelines, sales offices that keep the lights on without visible site activity, projects where the marketing has gone still but no formal pause or cancellation has ever been stated. Distinguishing a genuine pause from an involuntary stall from the outside is hard — the honest answer is that it usually requires a site visit and a look at whether construction financing or pre-sale receipts are actually moving, not a read of the sales brochure.

The tell: whose pipeline is funding whose

Here is the distinction that matters most for a buyer trying to judge which “still building” developer to trust. Two developers can look identical from a launch announcement — both breaking ground mid-downturn, both talking conviction — and be running fundamentally different models underneath.

In the first model, a developer’s completed, occupied, revenue-generating projects fund or credit-support the new pipeline. Time Square’s four delivered towers are real assets a lender or the company itself can point to; that track record is what makes an aggressive five-project pipeline a defensible, if still leveraged, bet.

In the second model, a developer has no completed inventory generating cash — it is funding the current phase’s construction with pre-sale deposits from a phase that hasn’t broken ground yet. This is the classic pattern behind stalled towers everywhere, not just Cambodia: it works exactly as long as new buyers keep showing up, and it stops working the moment pre-sale velocity slows, which is precisely what a downturn does. A developer running this model has to keep launching, market conditions be damned, because stopping means the funding chain snaps. From the outside, “aggressively launching through a downturn” and “trapped on a pre-sale treadmill” can produce the same press release.

The questions that actually separate the two: Does the developer have completed, occupied, independently verifiable projects predating the current pipeline? Is the new project’s construction financing bank-sourced or pre-sale-sourced — and can the developer or your agent tell you which, with anything beyond a verbal assurance? Has the pace of launches accelerated faster than the developer’s completed delivery history would suggest is prudent — Time Square’s jump from 17–30-storey completions to a 45–50-storey pipeline, running five ways at once, is the kind of scale escalation worth asking pointed questions about even from a developer with a real record.

What we would tell a buyer

Counter-cyclical building is not, on its own, a reason to trust a developer more or less than one that has paused. It is a reason to ask sharper questions. A developer building through a downturn with cash reserves and a completed track record behind it is making a defensible bet on timing — buying land cheap, competing for scarce buyer attention, and positioning for a recovery it can’t control the timing of. A developer building through a downturn because stopping would collapse its financing structure is making no bet at all; it is treading water in public. Both will use the same confident language in their marketing. The difference shows up in the balance sheet, the completed-versus-pre-sale ratio, and — as always in this market — in verifying claims independently rather than taking a sales office’s word for either the launch date or the last one.

None of this is investment advice, and Cambodia’s property cycle has surprised both bulls and bears before. Verify any specific developer’s current pipeline status, financing structure, and delivery history yourself before treating “still building” as a signal in either direction.