Greater rental retail transparency in Singapore soon

Retailers and landlords in Singapore can look forward to greater retail rental transparency after the details of the Fair Tenancy Consideration Framework are unveiled, probably this month. The framework will comprise three components: data transparency, education and awareness, and a mediation process.

The first component will make retail rent data transparent, likely pegged to street names, with a rough gauge of the size of the shop unit.

“We tried to push for more rent details which give better transparency (down to per square foot rental),” said Kurt Wee, president of the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (ASME). “But I think it’s not going to be easy to extract this data . . . If we ever want full transparency, we are talking about a new data bank. This means for every lease you sign, you have to fill up a set of obligatory information and file it with a certain data bank.”