Singapore pushed New York off the top spot for the strongest growth in residential rents in the final quarter of last year, fueled by a supply crunch and strong demand.
The city-state saw annual rents jump 28 percent in the quarter from a year earlier, Knight Frank said in a report.
New York followed with 19 percent growth, while London and Toronto took the third and fourth spots, a survey of prime residential rents across 10 cities showed.
Photo: Bloomberg
Singapore’s soaring rents — driven partly due to a lack of supply of new housing during the COVID-19 pandemic — have been a source of consternation for residents, sapping household budgets at a time when living costs are surging.
New visa rules to attract foreign talent are likely to supplement tenant demand.
The city has 17,000 private homes that are set for completion this year, which could provide some relief to accommodation pressures, said Leonard Tay, Knight Frank’s head of research in Singapore.
Ranked at the bottom of the list is Hong Kong, where rents fell 6.4 percent year-on-year as international companies deferred expansion plans, the report said.
Demand from tenants has dwindled as people left the territory during the pandemic.
While prime rents have remained robust across many global cities, the overall rate of annual growth is starting to slow, Knight Frank said.
Separately, Singapore Changi Airport has regained its title as the world’s best airport, after losing its long-held crown to Qatar for two years running during the height of pandemic travel restrictions.
Singapore pushed Doha’s Hamad International Airport into second place, with Tokyo’s Haneda Airport bagging third, in this year’s Skytrax World Airport Awards.
The US was conspicuous by its absence in the top 10.
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport was Europe’s top performer, up one spot to fifth place, while Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was the highest ranked North American airport, languishing in 18th place, but an improvement from 27th place last year.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals