General

The high-end property segment will likely be more affected by the latest round of cooling measures compared with mass-market projects, industry insiders said. Buyers and investors hoping for private home prices to drop sharply due to the measures will not be seeing that happen in the near term, as developers said that they are not going to cut prices massively. Mr Richard Lai, group chief financial...

New laws allowing for Airbnb-style stays are unlikely to come any time soon. The reasons include the "mixed views" given in a recently concluded public consultation and the global trend showing that such short-term stays raise rents and home prices, said Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong in Parliament yesterday. "We are studying the matter carefully," Mr Wong said of an ongoing review...

More than 2,000 reports of unauthorised short-term stays in residential units were received by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) between 2015 to 2017, Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong said in Parliament on Wednesday (Jul 11). Of these, 1,808 were in private homes and 390 in Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats. Mr Wong was responding to questions in Parliament on short-term...

Real estate firm Royal Group has raised its first sharia-compliant financing from RHB Bank Singapore for a S$300 million (US$220.8 million) property, helping widen the range of Islamic finance deals in Southeast Asia's main financial hub. Singapore has been promoting Islamic finance over the past decade, with the city-state issuing its first Islamic bond in 2009, aiming to attract religiously-minded...

While at least one collective sale bid will be launched as planned this week, others have hit the pause button or are drawing up new plans amid uncertain prospects following the surprise of fresh property cooling measures. An extension in tender closing dates is one way that some marketing agents hope will keep their en bloc sale bids alive. They also told Channel NewsAsia that homeowners’ price...

The amount of stamp duty collected by the Government rose by 45.9 per cent in 2017, with most of the receipts from property transactions, Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat revealed on Tuesday (Jul 10). This is up from the 14.2 per cent increase in stamp duty collected in 2016 and the 6.2 per cent decrease recorded in 2015. In a written response to a Parliamentary question by MP Gan Thiam Poh, Mr Heng...

The Government imposed cooling measures on its property market last week, in a bid to contain what the central bank described as “euphoria” in the sector. Here are three charts showing some of the factors behind the government’s concerns: 1. PRICES Residential property prices have rebounded since the middle of last year, after Singapore reduced a stamp duty on sellers and eased mortgage...

There is no rationale for the new housing curbs given that the Singapore property market "is in the early stages of a recovery and the recovery is in line with economic fundamentals", said the Real Estate Developers' Association of Singapore (REDAS) on Friday (Jul 6). The statement from the industry body came a day after the Government announced new property cooling measures. Among the curbs are a 5...

The new property cooling measures announced on Thursday (Jul 5) were not entirely unexpected given the recent euphoria in the housing market, but the speed and timing at which the measures were introduced as well as the extent of the curbs were “heavy-handed”, some analysts told Channel NewsAsia. Among the curbs are a 5 percentage point hike in Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) rates for citizens...

Crowds of potential buyers flooded showflats across Singapore shortly after new cooling measures were announced on Thursday (Jul 5), in the hope of avoiding a hike in stamp duty or tighter loan limits. Several showflats extended their opening hours until 11.59pm on Thursday, with some developers even bringing forward their launches by a couple of weeks. The Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) rates...