VAS and land on the balance sheet
Vietnamese Accounting Standards (VAS) carry land use rights at historical cost and do not permit the fair-value revaluation that IFRS allows. For land banks acquired years ago, the book figure can diverge materially from current market value.
Because VAS prevents routine upward revaluation, a property developer's reported book equity can understate the firm's real asset base when land has appreciated. That makes simple price-to-book comparisons between a VAS company and an IFRS peer misleading without adjustment.
Why the P/B comparison fails
Price-to-book ratios reported under VAS reflect accounting history rather than current market prices for land. The gap widens for companies with large, older land banks, where historical acquisition costs are a poor proxy for realisable value.
As a result, a Vietnamese developer's P/B is not directly comparable with an IFRS market unless the book figure is adjusted to reflect present-day land values or substituted with an independent valuation.
How the vnvalue real-estate model handles it
vnvalue's real-estate model does not rest on book value alone but blends an RNAV proxy with a discounted cash flow, plus a leverage screen. The model applies an RNAV / DCF blend of 40 / 60 to combine a stock-level asset proxy with forward cash generation.
The DCF leg uses a real-estate terminal growth of 3.5% in nominal VND and applies a sector beta of 1.11 when deriving a cost of equity for discounting. The leverage screen is used to flag instances where capital structure or disclosure undermines the blended estimate.
Limits and disclosure dependence
An RNAV proxy is still an estimate, and its quality depends on land-bank disclosure, which is uneven between companies. Where parcel-level descriptions, acquisition dates and embedded costs are missing, the RNAV component becomes less reliable.
Users should note that blending mitigates a single-method bias but does not eliminate uncertainty. Model outputs must be read in the context of disclosure quality and the leverage screen's flags.