(I am posting the following, solely to share my observations of the marketplace, and obviously have no intention to start a debate ala Yowetan's or Mr. B's. Those of you who understood where I am coming from, knew that I left the active participation of this forum, and so take this posting however you like it.)
The recent stock and bond sell-offs, when studied with the currency movements at the same time, to me they revealed the following:
- That the markets appeared very nervous of the prospect of more QEs, especially for Japan. After 5 years of QEs, with benign inflation rate in the general economy, more questions have been raised about the effect of more QEs. What happened in Japan has been illustrative.
- That the fund inflows to a country, over the last 5 years, could well not be from the US, but primarily from Japan, Britain and Europe. This was illustrated by the weakness of USD during the recent sell-offs.
For the Singapore property, my observations for the landed sector:
- More landed developers are marketing their projects at competitive prices. Especially so for boutique developers who acquired the lands 2 years ago.
- More selling from semi-d owners, when compared to just 3 months ago.
- More and more buyers are apparently HDB upgraders. Now, there is nothing wrong to upgrade the housing from an HDB, because the price psf for landed is still competitive when compared with the launch price of a new condo. However, when you are a landed investor, when seeing enquiries more and more from HDB upgraders, a red flaf would come up.
Cheers!