Singapore has moved up 10 spots to become the world’s seventh most expensive office location. According to Cushman & Wakefield’s global ranking, prime office rents shot up 78 percent in Singapore last year. The property consultancy expects demand for office space from companies across most industry sectors to remain strong this year against a tight supply till 2010. Cushman is predicting that...
Office Space
Standard Chartered Bank is investing S$206m in a new office building in Changi Business Park in Singapore. The new building will house the bank's back-end operations and a global learning centre, and will be completed in 2010. This makes Standard Chartered the latest financial institution to relocate part of its operations to Changi. DBS, Citibank and Credit Suisse have made similar announcements. The...
Life insurance firm Prudential is expected to save S$1.2 million a year in rent for the next 15 years when it moves into a transitional office site at Scotts Road. The site, which is slated to be ready in September, will house 2,500 staff. The target to construct the S$35 million, four-storey building by September is a challenging one given the resource crunch in the construction sector. Developer...
Germany's SEB Group has bought 12 strata-title floors of the office building Anson 79. It is paying S$215 million to Farrell Asset Management for some 10,300 square metres of Grade A office space. SEB already owns another nearby Grade A office building Springleaf Tower. Anson 79 is a 23-storey building in Shenton Way and is within walking distance of Tanjong Pagar MRT station. It has an occupancy of...
Singapore-listed Straits Trading Company is pumping in some S$60 million to build a new building. It will be developed on the site of the old Straits Trading Building and is expected to be completed in 2009. Agents for the New Straits Trading Building said they see strong demand for premium mid-sized office space. A new 28-storey Straits Trading Building will rise in the heart of Singapore's financial...
More investors pump money into office property as reselling them could reap huge gainsIT WAS probably the most profitable “flip” in the property market. In a deal announced last week, GE Real Estate made a whopping 73 per cent profit on its initial $75-million investment, when it sold Anson House for $129.5 million, a year after purchasing it. The 13-storey building, located at Anson Road, is now...
Three more properties have been put up for tender by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) for office and other uses. One site at Queensway is the former Alexandra fire station, which includes the former Singapore Civil Defence Camp. The tender will open this month for the two-storey building, with tenancy renewable up to 2015. Another two-storey building is the office formerly occupied by the Civil...
The strong demand for office space in the central business district has spilled over to the rest of Singapore. According to property consultants DTZ, the occupancy rate for office space islandwide climbed to 97.6 percent in the third quarter. This is largely because of an acute shortage of office space in the Central Business District (CBD). DTZ says the shortage is due to the demolition of Asia...
The short supply of available office space in the central business district is driving financial institutions to be more flexible when planning their real estate needs. “Currently, banking and finance tenants occupy 36 per cent of all Grade A stock in Singapore, or close to 500,000 sq m,” said Justin Kean, associate director of Asia Pacific occupier research at consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle...
Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Holdings may sell its one third stake in Singapore’s Marina Bay Financial Centre to Suntec Real Estate Investment Trust (Reit) when the complex is completed in 2010. The stake is likely to be worth “more than US$1 billion ($1.5 billion)”, Mr Justin Chiu, executive director of Cheung Kong said. The company is building the 24-hectare office and...