A strengthening Singapore dollar against regional currencies has made overseas properties more attractive for local investors. However, due to the year-end holiday season, market watchers said the full impact will not be seen until the new year. For now, popular investment options for Singaporeans - such as the Iskandar development in Malaysia - have not seen a marked increase in sales. This could also...
Overseas Property
Qatar on Thursday lodged a "final offer" to buy the owner of London's landmark Canary Wharf office quarter for US$4.1 billion. Sovereign wealth fund Qatar Investment Authority and US group Brookfield Property Partners said in a statement they have increased their bid for Songbird, a property firm which controls 69 per cent of Canary Wharf Group. The cash bid, pitched at 350-pence per share, compared...
China's housing prices fell on a monthly basis for the seventh straight month in November, a survey showed on Sunday (Nov 30), with the market yet to feel the full impact of an interest rate cut. The average price of a new home in China's 100 major cities was 10,589 yuan (US$1,736) per square metre in November, down 0.38 per cent from October, the independent China Index Academy said in a statement. The...
A 300-room luxury hotel that Singapore's Oxley Holdings will build in Phnom Penh is slated to be the first Shangri-la hotel in Cambodia. This was revealed at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Oxley Gem (Cambodia) and Shangri-La International Hotel on Thursday (Oct 23), whereby the luxury hotel operator will get a 60-day exclusivity period to negotiate the management of the...
GIC has acquired the office component of Pacific Century Place Marunouchi in Tokyo, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund announced in a press release on Tuesday (Oct 21). While GIC did not announce the cost, Reuters had earlier quoted sources as saying that the office tower was valued in the region of ¥170 billion (S$2 billion). The 32-storey mixed-use development was acquired through a GIC affiliate,...
Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng today (Oct 14) unveiled a new mixed-use development project led by a joint venture of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Penang’s state development agency, Penang Development Corporation. This comes as both governments take further steps to strengthen their trade and investment links. Situated near Penang’s Bayan Baru Free Industrial Zone, the S$500 million...
Japan has been grossly misunderstood to be a high-cost country. Most Singaporeans have the impression that taxes, food, real estate, and so on, are much more expensive in Japan than at home. At the very top end, the kaiseki ryori might cost more in Japan than in Singapore, but in terms of value, the dinner there beats the one here. However, in the mass-market segment, the same item in a Japanese...
Home prices in London, popular with overseas investors including Singaporeans, fell in September for the first time in almost four years and the outlook for the British capital’s housing market is fading, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said yesterday. RICS said its house price index for the capital dropped below zero in September for the first time since January 2011, ending a...
The Iskandar region is facing a home supply glut due to a large number of projects led by Chinese developers, which could compress rental yields down the line, said the head of Malaysia’s national representative body for property developers. “Over the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen developers from a certain country introducing a lot more units than Malaysian and Singaporean developers usually...
The real estate market in the United States has become one of the latest contenders for a slice of Singaporean investors’ growing interest in overseas properties, joining the ranks of traditionally popular markets such as Malaysia, Australia and Britain. In recent months, Singapore developers, including Keppel Land and Pontiac Land, have flocked to the US, taking stakes in American projects as they...