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City Life: Singapore

The island state that wishes it could be towed to less murky waters

Eric Ellis

Thursday, 12th April 2007

Singapore’s property market is roaring. I know that because our lease will soon expire and our landlady wants 70 per cent more rent than she did in 2004. No matter that our flat leaks like Blair’s Cabinet and that its 1970s-wired electricity trips at least once a week: these are details too far for our pococurante proprietrix. But she has noticed that a private banker from Tokyo has signed, sight unseen, for a same-sized unimproved flat downstairs at 150 per cent more than the vacating lessee. It’s all very puzzling: there’s no textbook rationale to the real-estate boom. The economy is growing at an unremarkable-for-Asia 6 per cent, much the same as it has for years, save the difficult ‘Asian Contagion’ period of the late 1990s. And though Singapore is wealthy, its population of only 4.5 million leaves it 2.4 billion consumers short of being ‘Chindia,’ the Asian neologism du jour that excites so many economists in Delhi and Beijing.

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