Luxury Real Estate in Singapore Draws Rich Chinese

Rich Chinese continue to snap up luxury homes in the city-state as they seek a safe and calm offshore location to park their wealth.

Protests in Hong Kong are driving rich Chinese property buyers away from the special administrative region to relatively calm and stable Singapore.

The Lunar New Year period is a particularly busy period for property agents in Singapore catering to this group of buyers – three interviewed by the publication said inquiries among mainland Chinese in the lead up to this period typically jump by 15 percent, with demand intensifying in the past two years.

Property cooling measures, which raised the additional buyer stamp duty on foreigners buying any residential property to 20 percent in July 2018, up from 15 percent, have had little effect on the demand for luxury apartments in Singapore – Chinese buyers of apartments S$5 million ($3.7 million) or more doubled in the third quarter of 2019 from the same period the year before, the report said.

Most buyers purchase properties as an investment and prefer those near landmark locations, according to realtors interviewed by the publication. However, they noted that a growing number of buyers are also buying apartments with the sole purpose of parking their wealth here.