Good point. I think many of us are confused by the sheer amount of market news posted here bombarding at us, so much so that we forget our objectives in investment.Originally Posted by Unregistered
Junior
Good point. I think many of us are confused by the sheer amount of market news posted here bombarding at us, so much so that we forget our objectives in investment.
Tend to agree, even though the prices inches up, we can see that it is at a reducing rate compared to the previous quarter. This is a sign of the market (property) slowing down. Also, actual & detailed figures not out yet, I would think the units sold is relatively much lower than previous quarter also. Now, with supply increasing in the next few quarters, at present, looking at the trend, most people (so call analysts who looks at figures , data and trends) will predict a price drop as the days passes. I may be wrong though.......
You are wrong. Prices wont drop.......they will come tumbling down. Same pattern being formed from the last crash.
It is better for them to Walk in walk out of condos trying to find cheap buys but in the end, all went home disappointed than for u to jump in and out of this forum like a MORON
Stupid fool many developers already sweating over enbloc deals they signed. Soon excess supply. Many enbloc's still in limbo. Go and check yrself. Police may not wear shorts but you may lose your pants.
Why you get so frustrated?
Price index only up a pathetic 4.2% what.
What's the difference between buying at $1.000 and $1.042?
No difference! Just go buy and stop venting your frustration here.
You are right only if rental market lost momentum, as refer to last crash pattern.
Hopefully they can get the money fast, if not .... especially those who have booked a unit.
To tumble down like last crash is not possible cos ppl n the gov are smarter now. ecomony are stronger compare last. but price dropping is sure certain, to wat level god only know, like any investement, it is hard to catch the bottom, but certainly dun catch falling knife., u might be killed. at tis moment,
it pays to be extra careful.
Asian stocks surge as bank moves bring relief
Tom Miles
Reuters
Hong Kong SAR
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
Asian stocks jumped and bonds fell on Wednesday after a Lehman Brothers securities offering met strong demand, raising hopes that the worst of the credit crisis might be over.
A US$19 billion write-down by Swiss bank UBS AG reinforced the view that the banks were aggressively scrubbing their books clean of soured investments tied to the U.S. housing market.
The change of mood boosted the dollar, which in turned pushed oil back down towards US$100 a barrel The currency held on to its gains in early Asian trade.
"The market has become somewhat confident that banks can overcome this crisis," said Kosuke Hanao, head of currency sales at HSBC. "The dollar's rebound may continue for a month."
The euro was little changed from its level in late New York trade at $1.5600, in sight of Tuesday's one-week low around $1.5560 and well below a record high of $1.5905 hit last month.
The dollar was quoted at 101.80 yen, little changed here, too, after jumping around 2 yen on Tuesday.
Bank shares led stock markets higher, lifting Japan's benchmark Nikkei 3.3% by 0041 GMT and shares in the rest of Asia .MIAPJ0000PUS 1.5%.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was up 2.8% and South Korea's benchmark KOSPI 2.2%. Seoul financials such as Kookmin Bank and Woori Finance Holdings surged more than 5% and Australia's Macquarie Group rose more than 8%.
The share price jumps followed big gains in JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America and Citigroup on Tuesday, which helped to drive both the Dow average and the S&P 500 up more than 3%.
U.S. technology stocks also had a strong start to the quarter. Nasdaq leapt more than 3%, helped by Microsoft, which rose 4% after saying it would not raise its takeover offer for Yahoo Inc..
But the buoyant sentiment in stocks drained enthusiasm for bonds. Japanese government bond futures followed U.S. Treasuries lower. June 10-year JGB futures 2JGBv1 dropped 0.30 point to 139.50 at the opening, before recovering to 139.72.
U.S. crude oil CLc1, which had settled down 60 cents on Tuesday at $100.98 a barrel after losing more than $4 on Monday, held steady in early Asian trade.
Gold regained some strength on a technical rebound after falling to a two-month low on Tuesday, when the rise in the dollar and the U.S. stock rally sparked selling in precious metals. Gold rose to $889.30/890.10 an ounce from $884.20/885.40 late in New York.
Dollar Holds Gains as Credit Worries Ease
Satomi Noguchi
Reuters
Tokyo, Japan
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
The dollar steadied against the euro and the Swiss franc on Wednesday, keeping sharp gains made the previous session on hopes that the latest rash of bank writedowns has marked the worst of the credit crisis.
Traders said worries about the fate of financial firms had eased somewhat after Lehman Brothers raised $4 billion to shore up its balance sheet, providing a boost to the dollar.
"The market has become somewhat confident that banks can overcome this crisis," said Kosuke Hanao, head of forex sales at HSBC.
"The dollar's rebound may continue for a month."
The euro was little changed from its level in late New York trade at $1.5600, in sight of Tuesday's one-week low around $1.5560 and well below a record high of $1.5905 hit last month.
The dollar steadied against the Swiss franc at 1.0120 francs after climbing to around 1.0140 francs the previous session, off an all-time low near 0.9600 francs struck in March.
The dollar edged down 0.2% to 101.60 yen. Traders said heavy selling from Japanese exporters capped the dollar's gains after jumping above 102 yen on Tuesday for the first time since early March. The U.S. currency had plunged to a 13-year low of 95.77 yen in March 17.
Investors had been nervous that other financial firms could go the way of Bear Stearns, which nearly collapsed last month amid a liquidity crisis.
But a $19 billion writedown by Swiss bank UBS reinforced the view that the banks were aggressively scrubbing their books clean of soured investments tied to the slumping U.S. housing market. UBS also said it would raise $15 billion in fresh capital through a rights issue of shares.
Still, some warned the U.S. currency may be in for renewed selling unless upcoming data begins to paint a sunnier picture of the U.S. economy.
On Tuesday, data from the U.S. Institute for Supply Management showed a continued contraction in the manufacturing sector while prices jumped to their highest since 2005. ID:nN01224839
If employment data due on Friday shows the U.S. economy shed jobs for a third straight month in March, analysts said the dollar could fall back towards record lows against the euro and the Swiss franc.
"There won't be any question about the dollar starting to fall again after the U.S. jobs data, especially when the market is swinging between extreme pessimism and optimism," said Kengo Suzuki, a currency strategist at Shinko Securities.
For clues about the jobs data, investors will look to a report on private sector employment from Automatic Data Processing (ADP) due later in the day.
The ADP report is expected to show that private sector employment shrank by 48,000 jobs in March.
Also on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is scheduled to testify on the economic outlook, though analysts expect it to offer few surprises.
Any complaints please PM me
Published April 2, 2008
Home prices hold their own, but just barely
Analysts expect at least one quarterly dip this year
By KALPANA RASHIWALA
(SINGAPORE) Despite the quieter market, home prices continued to edge up in the first quarter, although at a slower pace, latest flash estimates show.
The quarter-on-quarter rate of increase in the Urban Redevelopment Authority's price index for private homes decelerated to 4.2 per cent in Q1 this year, after a 6.8 per cent gain in Q4 2007.
Some property consultants are now factoring in declines for at least one of the remaining three quarters of this year, as the full impact of the US economic slowdown bites into the local property market.
URA's flash estimate also showed that regional sub-indices for non-landed private home prices posted smaller gains all-round in Q1 this year than they did in Q4 2007. However, the 4.8 per cent increase in the Outside Central Region (OCR) in Q1 outpaced gains of 4.4 per cent in the Core Central Region (CCR) and 3.9 per cent in the Rest of Central Region (RCR) - for the first time in four years.
Jones Lang LaSalle said prices are steady in the CCR, supported by deep-pocketed investors, but may be peaking in the RCR, while demand continues to be strong in the OCR as en bloc sellers pick up replacement homes in the suburbs, where prices are relatively more attractive.
In the public housing segment, the Housing & Development Board's flash estimate shows that the HDB resale flat price index rose 3.4 per cent in Q1 over the preceding quarter, again slower than the 5.7 per cent increase posted in Q4 last year.
Knight Frank director (consultancy and research) Nicholas Mak said that in a worst-case scenario - assuming the Singapore economy contracts in the coming months - URA's overall price index for private homes could post a full-year increase of zero to 5 per cent.
This factors in one quarter of decline, to the tune of 0.5 to 2.5 per cent, possibly towards the end of the year. Any decline in the index would be the first since Q1 2004, Mr Mak added.
Mr Mak's best-case scenario is for a 10-15 per cent full-year gain in the index, with increases in all four quarters.
URA's private home price index rose 31.2 per cent in 2007.
Colliers International's director for research and consultancy Tay Huey Ying too said that the Singapore property market is likely to experience the full impact of the US economic slowdown by Q3 or Q4 this year.
In a worst-case scenario, URA's private home price index may rise 8 to 10 per cent for the whole of this year, with possibly a decline in the fourth quarter of not more than 4 per cent, Ms Tay said.
In a best-case scenario - if the US enters a mild recession and recovers by the year-end and Singapore's GDP growth rate is at the higher end of the MTI's forecast of 4 to 6 per cent - the full-year increase in URA's index could be 12-15 per cent.
For the next quarter, CB Richard Ellis is predicting a marginal rise in the index, of about one to 2 per cent from the Q1 level. It estimates that developers sold about 700-1,000 private homes in Q1, less than the 1,449 units they sold in Q4 last year.
Observers said that price gains in the OCR may have come from the secondary market, from completed developments like The Clearwater and Aquarius by the Park in the Bedok Reservoir area. The fact that a new launch in the area, Waterfront Waves, sold for an average price of about $800 psf could have encouraged the trend.
In the western part of Singapore, units sold at The Lakeshore and LakeHolmz in the Boon Lay vicinity may also have helped boost the sub-index for non-landed homes in the OCR, analysts suggest.
Knight Frank's Mr Mak said that the 4.4 per cent gain in the CCR during Q1 was the lowest rate of increase in the past seven quarters.
As for the HDB resale price index, ERA Singapore assistant vice-president Eugene Lim predicts a full-year increase of not more than 10 per cent, compared with a 17.5 per cent jump in 2007.
Some demand may be taken away from the resale market because of a higher supply of new flats coming onstream, so resale prices may increase at a more measured pace in the coming months.
The HDB said in its release yesterday that the total planned Build-To-Order (BTO) supply of 6,100 new flats for Jan-Sept 2008 will surpass the annual BTO flat supply in 2007 (6,000 units) and 2006 (2,400 units).
HDB's records show that in February 2008, about a quarter of resale flats were transacted at prices not exceeding $10,000 above market valuation.
y do humans need to be puppets? because most have weak spines. or the puppeteer is a control freak who just insist in having her way at all times.
Manhattan Apartment Prices Rise
Ilaina Jonas
Reuters
New York, New York, U.S.
Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 12:41am U.S. EDT
Manhattan apartment prices soared in the first quarter, but sales fell and inventory rose under the weight of tighter mortgage terms and Wall Street job fears, according to several reports.
The median sales price rose 13.2% to a record $945,276 over the prior-year quarter, while the average sales price increased 33.5% to a record $1,722,991, according to the Prudential Douglas Elliman Manhattan Market Overview quarterly report released on Wednesday.
"The market is leaning much more to the higher end and part of that comes from what's gone on in the mortgage markets," said Greg Heym, senior vice president of research for Terra Holdings, parent company of real estate firms Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead Property.
"In the mid- to lower-price stuff you see fewer sales in these categories because those are the people affected by tighter standards," Heym said.
The Manhattan housing market has been insulated from the U.S. housing crisis that has sent the national median sales price of an existing home down 8.2% to $195,900. New home prices have fallen even further.
However, soaring mortgage defaults nationwide set off a broader credit crisis that could put more than 25,000 New York jobs in the financial sector - which drives the local real estate market -- at risk.
"When a market is on such solid footing as ours was, it cannot fall apart in a span of a couple of months. It's going to take longer than that. You're going to have to see more layoffs actually happening," Heym said. "Until people are forced to sell their apartment for whatever they can get for them, that's the missing ingredient in a downturn."
So far it hasn't.
The average price per square foot leaped 20.5% to a record US$1,289 psf, according to the Prudential report.
Halstead Property said the average price rose 47% over the first quarter 2007 to $1,690,995, driven by sales of apartment priced over $10 million.
"There were 84 sales in between 15 Central Park West and The Plaza and the effect that that has on all these number is tremendous," Heym said.
Some of the apartment sold during the quarter -- including those at 15 Central Park West and The Plaza -- reflect deals that had been agreed to in previous years.
The median sales price rose 13%, Halstead said. Although sales at ultra luxury projects 15 Central Park West and The Plaza skewed the results, prices still set records or near records even after removing those deals. Without the two projects the average price would have been $1,417,496, Halstead said.
Yet the pace of sales slowed and the number of homes on the market rose for the first time since the housing boom started about four years ago, Herman said.
"That's the story -- sales and inventory this quarter," said Jonathan Miller, author of the Prudential report.
The number of sales fell 1%, according to Halstead. It had about 600 more sales in its statistical pool than Prudential, which said the number fell 34.3% this quarter to 2,282 units. It was the largest drop since Miller began compiling the report in 1989.
"These numbers reflect what happen with the mortgage fiasco," and do not reflect the layoffs that have yet to happen, said Dottie Herman, Prudential CEO.
"People have no sense of urgency, and you're in a much more price sensitive time now," she said. "There's a lot of uncertainty."
The number of homes on the market rose 4.6% to 6,194 from last year, Prudential said. Homes for sale remained on the market for 146 days, two weeks longer than a year earlier, according to the Prudential report.
Wiggle room on prices remained about the same as last year, about a 3.2% discount from the asking price, according to the Prudential report.
"It's not a buyers' market yet, but the pendulum has switched to the buyers now," Corcoran Group Chief Executive Officer Pam Liebman said.
The Corcoran Group said the average price jumped 19% to $1.626 million, while the median rose 9% to $917,000. The price per square foot was up 16% to $1,224. Inventory of homes for sale was up 15% at the end of March.
Why must Manhatten apartment prices go up?
What kind of question is this?
Any complaints please PM me
April 2, 2008
Home prices growing, but less sharply
By Fiona Chan, Property Reporter
HOME seekers waiting for property prices to fall in a sluggish market were disappointed by numbers released yesterday.
Government estimates showed that the prices of private and Housing Board homes continued to rise in the first three months of the year to near their 1996 peaks.
But growth was markedly lower than before and is likely to slow further in coming months, experts said.
Some even suggested that home prices may start to ease later this year - for the first time in four years - if the Singapore economy brakes more sharply than expected.
Mr Nicholas Mak, director of research and consultancy at Knight Frank, was among industry watchers who had expected prices to plateau or even dip in the first quarter, after developers reported dismal sales of new homes in January and February.
But prices held stubbornly, backed by a still healthy economy, some new launches at benchmark prices and the reluctance of sellers to lower asking prices.
However, the number of home sales plunged from last year, leading consultants to warn that yesterday's price figures are based on fewer deals and may not be representative of the whole market.
They added that buyers willing to take the plunge now are mostly genuine occupiers, with speculators having almost completely exited.
Private home prices climbed 4.2 per cent in the first 10 weeks of the year, down from 6.8 per cent in the previous quarter and the smallest rise since 2006. Suburban home prices gained the most, rising 4.8 per cent.
HDB resale flats also saw a smaller increase in prices: 3.4 per cent, compared with 5.7 per cent previously.
The 'weaker than expected' growth comes amid continued volatility in global stock markets and a weaker Singapore market outlook, said Mr Chua Yang Liang, Jones Lang LaSalle's head of research for South-east Asia.
But Ms Tay Huey Ying, director of research and consultancy at Colliers International, called the price growth 'very encouraging', given the few transactions.
Property consultants took the chance yesterday to cut their forecasts for price growth for the whole year.
Most now predict single-digit rises compared with their earlier estimates of growth between 10 and 20 per cent. Last year, private home prices soared 31 per cent while HDB resale prices jumped 17.5 per cent.
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foreighn talen @SS
Yes, scary right? Indeed, indeed.
So many of them coming here.
Where to find so many condo to house them?
No choice lah! We need them.
Any complaints please PM me
First signs of housing market slowdown
By Tan Hui Leng, TODAY | Posted: 02 April 2008 0828 hrs
Singapore - AFTER property fever hit euphoric levels last year, flash estimates from the Housing and Development Board and the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) show the growth in real estate is slowing down significantly.
The index for the private home market showed prices rose 4.2 per cent in the first three month, down from the last quarter’s 6.8 per cent growth.
And looking ahead, some property watchers are taking a more subdued stand — expecting private property prices to inch forward a modest 1 to 2 per cent in the second quarter, and 5 to 10 per cent for the whole of this year. Should the economy contract on the back of a United States recession, home prices could fall for the first time since 2004, said an analyst.
But, PropNex chief executive officer Mohd Ismail, for one, is optimistic. While foreign interest last year buoyed the property market in the downtown and core central region, he said, strong domestic demand is expected to drive growth in the mass market.
He noted how condominiums in outlying estates such as Woodlands and
Jurong East are averaging $550 to $600 per square foot (psf), which is “still very affordable pricing that has moved up marginally from before the boom last year”. He predicted: “The mass market will continue to perform with prices expected to well exceed 10 per cent for 2008.”
He attributed the first quarter’s results to a low volume of transactions, due to many developers holding back property launches and sellers holding on to their properties.
ERA noted that after a fast-paced 2007, the private housing market seems to have come to “some form of standstill”.
“The lower overall price increase indicates that buyers have turned cautious in view of continued concerns about the US economy, sub-prime crisis and the
erratic stock market,” said ERA’s assistant vice-president Eugene Lim.
Knight Frank, which expects the rate of increase of private home prices to remain below 5 per cent in the first three quarters, outlined the most sobering scenario.
“If the economy were to contract in the coming months, home prices would face strong downward pressure and could experience their first decline since first quarter 2004,” said its director of consultancy and research Nicholas Mak.
Flash estimates are compiled based on transaction prices given in caveats lodged in the first ten weeks of the quarter, supplemented by information on the number of new units sold.
More complete statistics will be updated four weeks later and the URA notes, the difference between the flash estimate and actual price changes could be significant when the change is small. TODAY
Hurray!
Prices for the first 10 weeks of this year went up by 4.2%.
Yes!
What about adding the last 2 weeks to it?
The next 10 weeks go down by 42%, so dun be happy.
You say the next 10 weeks go down by 42%.
He say the next 10 weeks go up by 42%.
So both are you are bullshitting!
Re: HDB and private property prices up in Q1 flash estimates
Bro, read properly. one says go up by only 4.2%. The other one who says go down by 42% is a moron and an idiot.
If the last 2 weeks go up another 0.5% (just for an example), then add 0.5% to 4.2%. So, you get 4.7%.
Moron jumping with joy. saw went up 4.2 % LAST 10 wks (past). idiot say go down 42% (future) next 10 wks, which 1 u prefer????
I preferred the 4.2% cos' it is realistic. The other one is totally unrealistic and based purely on imagination.
Another Moron living in the past.
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