Singapore’s home market continues to slide in 2024
Singapore’s sagging housing market leads Mingtiandi’s headline roundup today as homebuyer activity drops by two-thirds in the Lion City. Hong Kong’s CK Asset also makes the list as it slashes prices on some homes by a third and Guangdong-based developer Agile has defaulted on offshore debt for the first time.
Singapore New Home Sales Dropped 66% in April
Developers in Singapore chalked up 301 new private home sales in April, down 58.1 percent from March’s take-up as fewer new units were launched in the month, official data showed.
Year on year, last month’s new home sales were 66.2 percent lower than the 890 units recorded in April 2023. Including the hybrid public-private executive condo segment, new unit sales dropped 57.7 percent from 832 units in March to 352 units in April, according to data from the Urban Redevelopment Authority released on Wednesday (May 15). Read more>>
Li Ka-shing’s CK Asset Cuts Prices by a Third to Sell New Homes
Hong Kong developer CK Asset Holdings Ltd. has slashed prices for some homes by a third, as market competition heats up.
CK is offering discounts for 28 units in its project called #LYOS located in the New Territories. Apartments made available from previously canceled transactions have discounts up to 25 percent, the company said in a statement. Meanwhile, the values for two-story units were cut by as much as 32 percent. Read more>>
Mainland Developer Agile Defaults on Offshore Bonds for the First Time
Agile Group Holdings Ltd., a Chinese developer of villa apartments and high-rise homes, defaulted for the first time on publicly issued dollar bonds, underscoring lingering distress amid the nation’s unprecedented property crisis.
The company, based in the southern province of Guangdong, hasn’t paid interest within a grace period that ended May 13 on dollar bonds due 2025, it said in a filing. The builder will engage an external financial adviser and legal adviser to assist in evaluating the capital structure and liquidity. Read more>>
AirTrunk Launches Second Tokyo Data Centre Campus
APAC data center firm AirTrunk has launched a new campus in Tokyo, Japan. The company this week announced the launch of its TOK2 campus in the west of the capital city. The site is servicing a “major cloud availability zone.”
Plans for the TOK2 campus were announced in May 2022, with the company breaking ground on the first building in November of that year. The company is concurrently working on the next phase of the campus. Read more>>
Warburg Pincus Closes on Acquisition of India’s Shriram Housing Finance
US private equity firm Warburg Pincus has fully acquired Shriram Housing Finance Ltd (SHFL) from its promoter Shriram Finance and minority shareholder Valiant Capital Management for INR 46.3 billion ($554 million), in the largest M&A deal in the housing finance sector.
The deal will allow Warburg to foray into the ever expanding affordable housing space in the world’s fourth largest economy. Read more>>
Temasek CIO Looking for Big Market Investments as Global Tensions Rise
Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd will focus on investing in companies with large, domestic-focused businesses, as it seeks to avoid risks tied to simmering geopolitical tensions around the world.
The company is looking to place such bets in countries with fast-growing economies, chief investment officer Rohit Sipahimalani said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Qatar on Tuesday. The Singaporean state-owned investor views geopolitics as one of the biggest risks to its portfolio at the moment. Read more>>
China Mulls Government Home Purchases Amid Housing Glut
China is considering a proposal to have local governments across the country buy millions of unsold homes, sources familiar with the matter said, in what would be one of its most ambitious attempts yet to salvage the beleaguered property market.
The State Council is seeking feedback from several provinces and government entities on the preliminary plan, said the sources, asking not to be identified as discussing a private matter. While China has already experimented with several pilot programmes to clear excess housing inventory with the help of state funding, the latest plan would be much larger in scale. Read more>>
Developer Whitelist May Not Be Enough to Bail Out Troubled Mainland Builders
When China’s local governments began compiling a “whitelist” of housing projects for loans earlier this year, troubled developers hoped it would open a spigot of credit for a sector that remains a major stumbling block to a broad economic revival.
Four months later, new funding is only coming by the drip, reflecting the deep-seated caution about the outlook for China’s residential property market, according to Reuters interviews with bankers and developers. Read more>>
Tune in again soon for more real estate news and be sure to follow @Mingtiandi on X, or bookmark Mingtiandi’s LinkedIn page for headlines as they happen.