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Singapore home prices to lag behind HK on building boom

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-04 09:26

Singapore home prices to lag behind HK on building boom

A boat carries tourists across Marina Bay in front of the haze-shrouded skyline of downtown Singapore. The city-state will see nine times the number of new apartments going up over the next three years than in Hong Kong. [Bloomberg News]

SINGAPORE: A bungalow on Singapore's Ocean Drive, a stretch of luxury homes lined with Bentleys and Ferraris, sold for a record S$30 million ($21 million) in October. In Hong Kong, a duplex a third the size went for almost three times as much the same month.

Singapore's luxury-home prices won't match Hong Kong's because an increase in building ahead of two casino projects in the city-state will see nine times the number of new apartments going up over the next three years than in Hong Kong, according to real estate broker Savills Plc. Singapore's high-end home prices rose 4 percent in 2009, while Chinese buyers fueled a 45 percent jump in Hong Kong, Savills said.

"Hong Kong has some unique factors which drive the super luxury market, particularly mainland buyers who have been very aggressive," said Simon Smith, Savills's Hong Kong-based head of research and consulting. "We will always see some dramatic prices in Hong Kong you wouldn't necessarily see in Singapore."

Luxury property prices in Singapore are about 19 percent below their 2007 peak, according to a Goldman Sachs report published on Jan 13. They may rise about 15 percent this year, though still remain 7 percent below their highs by the end of 2010, Goldman said. Hong Kong luxury prices, which have surpassed their mid-2008 peak, will rise 15 percent in the next six months, Colliers International Ltd forecast in January.

Holiday resorts

Two resorts are being built in Singapore, with casinos, hotels, restaurants and attractions that the government hopes will help lure 17 million visitors and triple annual tourism revenue to S$30 billion by 2015.

Genting Singapore Plc unit Resorts World Sentosa opened part of its $4.5 billion project on southern Sentosa island last month, while Las Vegas Sands Corp said it may open the Marina Bay Sands, in downtown, in April after construction delays.

To make the economy less dependent on electronics manufacturing, the Singapore government in April 2005 overturned a ban on casinos that had been in place since independence in 1965. Resorts World and Marina Bay are the only two casino developments approved and the government has said there will be only two gaming operators for 10 years.

"The integrated resort is a stale story by now," Tay Huey Ying, a Singapore-based director of research and consulting at Colliers, said at a property seminar on Jan 13. "I do not foresee a great impact. We will need another growth story to bring the foreigners back to Singapore."

In contrast, the number of casinos in Macao, the world's biggest casino hub and the only Chinese city where gambling is legal, more than doubled to 33 in 2009 from 2002, when Stanley Ho's casino monopoly ended. Residential prices will increase as much as 15 percent in the city this year, according to a Savills report on Macao published on Jan 27.

Casinos

Sands China Ltd, the Macao unit of Las Vegas Sands, will open most of its stalled resort in Macao by December 2011, adding 27,871 sq m of gaming space to the 849,000 sq ft it already has, the company said.

More than 130 apartments around Singapore's Marina Bay and 900 apartments at Sentosa Cove have yet to be put on sale. City Developments Ltd, Singapore's second-biggest property developer, and YTL Corp, Malaysia's biggest builder, are among those preparing to put more homes on the market this year.

Bloomberg News