Foreign interest in local properties have not waned despite rising prices and supply over the past half a decade. Their appetite have not diminished, if at all. Transactions may have shrunk slightly due to the additional costs involved in foreign-purchases of properties in Singapore, put in place by the series of property cooling curbs rolled out since 2011, but they buyers are back in the market in search of potential sites and units, in particular buyers from mainland China.
In a year-on-year comparison, foreign property transactions were up 11.8 per cent and this excludes purchases by permanent residents. Besides the Chinese, other major buyers hail from Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States. Each group have their preferences as the numbers show. Chinese buyers mostly favoured suburban properties while Malaysia and Indonesian buyers went for core central region units. 68 per cent of Indonesian buyers and 40 per cent to Malaysian buyers purchased homes in the prime districts while 58 per cent of transactions from the Chinese were for homes outside of the core central districts. Most Indonesia buyers are willing to pay $2,000 psf and above for prime properties while Chinese buyers usually went for properties priced between $750 to $1,700 psf.
The Additional Buyers’ Stamp Duty (ABSD) may have been a deterrent at one point in time, but as the government made clear that the measures are here to stay, acceptance is beginning to truly sink in and buyers are willing to spend the additional amounts in exchange for long-term capital gains. Buyers from the United States are exempt from the ABSD due to a free-trade agreement and this has raised the number of buyers up from 1.1 to 7.3 per cent over the past 5 years.
