Home owners may face higher mortgage payments, following recent hikes in a key benchmark interest rate that housing loans in Singapore are based on. According to data from Bloomberg, the three-month Singapore Interbank Offered Rate (SIBOR) was fixed at 0.62 per cent on Tuesday (Jan 6). This is up from 0.57 per cent on Monday. Last Friday, it was around 0.45 per cent, up from 0.4 per cent in...

Shopping mall rents in Singapore are likely to stay flat for a second year in a row, held down by strong resistance on the part of retailers already struggling with high costs, property services firm Colliers International said on Tuesday (Jan 6). Colliers estimated that for the whole of 2014, the average monthly gross rents of prime retail space in Orchard Road slipped by 0.8 per cent year-on-year,...

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and Housing and Development Board (HDB) will ensure that a proposed temple at Fernvale Link in Sengkang will "integrate well with the surrounding developments, the same way other existing places of worship have been integrated in many residential estates", both agencies said in a statement on Tuesday (Jan 6). This follows an outcry by residents over plans for a...

Weak demand for conventional factory space, coupled with a big injection of supply to existing stock, contributed to falling rents for industrial space in the fourth quarter of last year, said property consultancy DTZ Research on Monday (June 1). Demand for space in business parks and high-tech industrial facilities, on the other hand, continued to rise, underpinning rents for this sector, it said,...

Hotels here have seen their growth affected by regional geopolitics and negative reactions to aviation incidents, property consultancy Cushman & Wakefield said on Monday (Jan 5). In its latest report on the outlook of the hotel industry across Asia, Cushman & Wakefield said hotel occupancy in Singapore is expected to have fallen to 84.3 per cent in 2014, down from 86 per cent the previous year, due to a...

A row of five adjoining shophouses at Teck Chye Terrace will be put up for sale by auction later in January. Located at the junction of Upper Serangoon Road and Boundary Road, the freehold shophouses sit on a land area of about 7,861 sq ft . The five units have a total floor area of approximately 12,163 sq ft. Its marketing agent Colliers International said in a statement on Monday (Jan 5) that the...

Private residential property prices fell 1 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) flash estimates released on Friday (Jan 2) - a larger decline than the 0.7 per cent slide in the previous quarter, and the fifth consecutive quarters of price decreases. For the whole of 2014, prices have fallen by 4 per cent, the URA said. Overall, the private...

Flash estimates of the fourth quarter Resale Price Index - the first estimates based on a new method of calculation - showed a 1.4 per cent decline in the prices of Housing and Development Board flats over the previous quarter, the HDB announced on Friday (Jan 2). The newly-adopted Stratified Hedonic Regression method "will control for variations in flat attributes of the resale flats transacted, thus...

Prime office rent in the Republic is expected to rise by 5 to 7 per cent in 2015, helped by the lack of new office space in the next two years, real estate services firm Knight Frank said on Wednesday (Dec 31). Knight Frank said that while more firms in the technology, media and internet sectors are looking to relocate to prime office spaces, the amount of new office space coming onto the market next...

Six in 10 existing owners of 900,000 Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats in Singapore continue to live in their first flat, which is "remarkably high", said National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan in a blogpost on Wednesday (Dec 31). Of the 26 HDB towns and estates, Tanjong Pagar/Chinatown/Bugis had the highest percentage of owners still living in their first flat, at 77 per cent. Other high...