URA pulls foreigner home buying price data, leaving gaps in market overview

Data had allowed users to study buying behaviour of specific nationalities for a given locality or time frame

Tue, Nov 10, 2020

Nisha Ramchandani

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/rea...arket-overview

A RECENT overhaul of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) platform providing data on the Singapore property market has also stripped out certain pricing data on foreign buying, leaving gaps on how such transactions are shaping a robust property market.

The URA in October launched an enhanced version of its subscription-based Real Estate Information System (Realis). With it, however, came the removal of a function to analyse caveats by nationality for any given period against price range or against unit price range. Realis still allows for transactions by nationality to be measured against other variables, such as postal district and tenure of land.

According to Lam Chern Woon, senior director at Edmund Tie (research and consulting), the now-missing functionality had allowed users to study the buying behaviour of specific nationalities for a given locality or time frame.

This in turn allowed them to understand purchasing preferences in terms of price quantum and unit price (per square foot).

For example, in terms of price quantum, the data could be used to study the volume of homes bought by certain nationalities in any given quarter, zooming in on different price categories - S$500,000 to S$1 million; S$1-S$1.5 million; S$1.5-S$2 million; and other relevant price ranges.

Executive director (research & consultancy) at Savills, Alan Cheong, told The Business Times that the data in question is valuable for consultants and academics as it helps them establish a buyer profile by quantum size. In addition, it enables to them to back up anecdotal evidence with hard data. "In the age of data science, it is good to provide even more data," Mr Cheong said.

Without this, analysts would not be able to better capture the price range of some of the bigger buys in recent weeks by foreigners. This is also comes amid a buoyant property market that has left some disconnect with the pandemic-stricken economy.



Active foreign buyers of private residential transactions in Singapore from the start of the year to mid-August included those from China, Malaysia, India, Indonesia and the US, a Knight Frank report in September showed.

Homebuyers from China opted for locations in Districts 1, 9 and 10 for centrally located homes, while preferring Districts 18 and 19 for suburban units. Buyers from India purchased a larger proportion in the East and North-East of Singapore, from District 18 as well as Districts 15 and 19.

Indonesian buyers zoomed in on prime Districts 9 and 10.

Foreign homebuyers - comprising Singapore permanent residents and foreigners - made up 18.3 per cent of purchases in Q2 2020, a slight drop of 1.9 percentage points over that in Q1. This came despite cross-border travel being largely on hold.

Realis is meant to provide up-to-date, detailed data on Singapore's property market, including databases on sale and rental transactions as well as developers' sales.

The new version of Realis was aimed at making the platform more user-friendly and accessible, and saw the introduction of new features such as a data section on monthly developers' sales, improved search filters for more targeted data searches of transactions as well as charts and tools to help with data analysis.

In response to queries from The Business Times, a spokesperson for URA said: "As part of the review of Realis, we consulted key users, (such as) property data analysts and consultants, on their needs and studied the usage rates of different datasets. We excluded a small number of datasets from the enhanced version due to their very low usage rates."

The spokesperson added that URA will continue to review data functions and their usage in line with user feedback as part of regular updates to Realis.

Analysts BT spoke said Realis was the only avenue for them to obtain that information. Insights gleaned from the data could be useful for property agencies and developers in their sales strategies, especially when it comes to foreign buyers. Foreign buyers may also rely on the data as a reference point.

One analyst who declined to be named said the data relating to price range and unit price range could be included in a report circulated to many readers, even though it may not be widely accessed by individual Realis users.

Singapore is already transparent when it comes to property information, thanks to regularly issued statistics as well as other online portals with analysis tools, noted Mr Lam of Edmund Tie.

Seasoned analysts also rely on on-the-ground channel checks and their own experience in examining issues. "Nonetheless, the nationality/price data is useful to augment what we are seeing on the ground," said Mr Lam. "We hope that the data can be made available again."

Some analysts lamented too that quarterly e-publications on private residential and office markets are also no longer distributed by URA, although the data tables that would normally be available in the publications can still be extracted from Realis.

URA's Property Market Information (PMI) and URA Space e-services saw enhanced versions launched last month as well. Updates included extending available historical data on private housing sale and rental deals from the last three years to five years on the PMI web page and a new feature on URA Space offering granular, site-specific planning information.