Ho Ching recommendation to foreigners, buy S-REIT instead of Spore residential property in her facebook
Extract from Ho Ching post :[Afternote:
Above corrected from earlier info on joint ownership for a married couple, and the ABSD on a 2nd jointly owned property.]
And of course, ABSD only applies to residential properties. There is no ABSD for commercial properties etc.
Plus, there are now over 30+ S-REITs for interested investors to get exposure to various kinds of properties for investment, without having to go buy single chunky assets, which could be hard to dispose when we need to cash.
The S-REITs in this environment yield anywhere from 4% for more conservatively managed portfolios, to over 10% for the higher risk portfolios.
The S-REITs don’t require huge amounts of money to start. And we can buy an ETF on S-REITs too to diversify single S-REIT manager risks.
S-REITs were first conceived and developed as a way for ordinary mom and pop retail and small investors to have digestible access to a chunky asset class of properties. It is a way for folks to invest in a well regulated, relatively stable and easily understood asset in bite sizes of 1000 units. Overseas folks are most welcome to invest in other productive segments of the economy, with residential properties largely meant to be homes for people to stay as owner occupiers.
Hence, foreign buyers are subject to a hefty ABSD of 60%, doubling the earlier rate of 30%.
This hefty jump must mean that MAS must already be seeing increasing flows into the residential property market post pandemic, and hence, the quick preemptive cooling measure, esp in the light of various macro global trends.
So foreigners still interested in property assets can invest in S-REITs or S-REIT ETFs as an alternative to crowding into the residential home market in tiny Sg
At the same time, foreign buyers can also have access to a more liquid asset underpinned by an easily understood and well diversified asset like property. In this way, they don’t need to park their emergency savings into a single property, and find it difficult to sell and monetise that one chunky asset precisely during emergencies when markets may dry up.