Tag Archives: property-cooling measures

Call for review of property curbs increasingly insistent

Posted on 18 Nov 2015 | Comments Off on Call for review of property curbs increasingly insistent

Singapore’s second-biggest property developer, City Developments, has been calling on the government to ease the property cooling measures “as soon as possible”, reported the Singapore Business Review.

The company saw its profit fall 16 percent in Q3, on the back of lower contributions from its property development unit. “The Group continues to hold the view that the property cooling measures need to be reviewed as soon as possible, given that the home ownership rate in Singapore is over 90 percent. Timing is the most important factor to achieve a healthy and sustainable property market,” it said in a statement.

Notably, the quarterly Real Estate Sentiment Index released by the Real Estate Developers’ Association of Singapore (REDAS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) earlier this month showed that market sentiment among property developers had fallen further in Q3 2015. “The sentiment in the market continued to weaken in Q3 2015,” said NUS associate professor Sing Tien Foo.

As such, more respondents called for the removal of “some of the cooling measures, such as ABSD and SSD to arrest the worsening market condition”.

In fact, 83.1 percent of the respondents believed the government should tweak or lift the cooling measures in the next six months. 56.7 percent of them felt the sellers’ stamp duty (SSD) should be lifted, while 60.8 percent said the additional buyers’ stamp duty (ABSD) should be removed.

“ABSD should be removed due to the tight supply of housing in the market. It should not be a permanent policy, as it creates inefficient market equilibrium. Furthermore, it does not encourage financial prudence. MSR and TDSR are based on ratios and percentages; percentages only address the issues of the average category, and could be too harsh or too lenient,” noted one survey respondent.

“The ABSD should be lifted as private residential property prices dropped by about eight percent in Q2 2015, compared to the third quarter of 2013. However, the TDSR Ratio should be retained,” said another respondent.

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Luxury prices fell 12.6% y-o-y in Q1

Posted on 16 May 2015 | Comments Off on Luxury prices fell 12.6% y-o-y in Q1

Prices of luxury residential property in Singapore were noted as being the worst performing of the 35 global cities monitored by real estate firm Knight Frank in its latest Prime Global Cities Index.

Luxury prices in the city-state fell 12.6 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared to a year ago.

Quarter-on-quarter, prime residential prices dropped 3.7 percent in Q1 2015 from the previous three-month period.

The property cooling measures have hit Singapore’s high-end residential sector the most, revealed Knight Frank’s 2015 Wealth Report published in March.

Alice Tan, research head for Knight Frank Singapore said at the time, “This may be a good time for the UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals) to re-look at luxury residential homes here, because we believe if the government relaxes the cooling measure for this segment of the market, the recovery could be evident.”

Meanwhile, San Francisco topped the list with the highest annual price growth of 14.3 percent. This was followed by Bengaluru (India) and Miami which saw prices grow 13.6 percent and 12.2 percent on year respectively.

Knight Frank considers prime property as the top five percent of the wider residential housing market in each city it surveys.

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