Just two days into 2019, the world already looks much different than it had a few months before after Hong Kong’s office market last month came to a near standstill, and in Singapore prices for private homes suffered their first quarterly drop in a year and a half. The downturn in East and Southeast Asia has yet to be felt in India, however, where the world’s only $42 billion shared real estate startup now plans to expand its operations in 2019. Read on for all these headlines and more about what’s happening in the new year.
Singapore Private Home Prices Drop 0.1% in Q4
Singapore’s private residential prices saw their first quarterly decline since the second quarter of 2017, as the market continued to feel the effects of the July 6th cooling measures. Private home prices dipped by 0.1 percent quarter on quarter in the final three months of 2018, reversing from a 0.5 percent increase in the third quarter.
For the whole of 2018, prices rose 7.9 percent, compared with the 1.1 percent increase in 2017. Read More>>
HK Records Just Three Office Sales in December
Only three sales of office space were completed in Hong Kong in December, the lowest number in a decade and a sign of the spreading malaise in the city’s property market.
For the whole of last year, there were 196 sales of either single offices, whole floors or entire office buildings — 45 percent less than in 2017, according to property firm Midland IC&I. Read More>>
WeWork to Open Co-Living Unit in India in 2019
WeLive, a co-living concept owned and operated by New York-headquartered Wework, is set to debut in India in 2019. The SoftBank-backed company is currently piloting the project in the United States and is in talks with its Indian partner, Embassy Group, to launch it in the country to tap the growing number of millennials.
WeLive currently serves hundreds of members across 400 apartments at its first two locations, WeLive Wall Street (New York City) and WeLive Crystal City (Virginia), which opened in April 2016 and May 2016, respectively. Read more>>
Faraday Future Finalises Divorce From Evergrande
Embattled electric car start-up Faraday Future is free to conduct debt and equity financing after it settled a dispute with mainland China property conglomerate Evergrande Group, a key investor, on Monday.
Evergrande said it had agreed to restructure its pledged US$2 billion investment in the Los Angeles, California-based carmaker, which is controlled by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, ending a months-long dispute. Both sides have also agreed to drop all allegations against each other. Read More>>
Mainland State Media Urges Cities to Cut Reliance on Land Sales
China’s regional economies need to reduce their reliance on the property market for growth and focus on sustainable longer-term development, the Communist Party’s People’s Daily wrote on Wednesday.
“All areas should focus on their own urbanization processes, develop their own pillar industries according to population mobility and resources, and form new points of growth to avoid the old road of relying on real estate to drive the economy,” the commentary quoted a professor at Capital University of Economics and Business as saying. Read more>>
Mainland Investors Expected to Continue Retreat From Global Real Estate Markets
Chinese investors will likely continue beating a retreat from the world’s top commercial real estate markets in 2019, adding to the downward pressure on prices from rising interest rates.
For years, the increasing flow of Chinese capital, alongside investments from other foreign countries, helped push property values higher. But now, the opposite is happening as Beijing continues its tight restrictions on capital outflows. Read more>>
Tune in again on Thursday for more news, and be sure to follow @Mingtiandi on Twitter, or bookmark Mingtiandi’s LinkedIn page for headlines as they happen.
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