Few Remaining Available Office Space In Singapore’s Marina Bay

SINGAPORE – Bloomberg Opinion’s Andy Mukherjee thinks that Marina Bay is running out of vacant office space, according to an analysis that was published on Wednesday morning (14 December, SGT).

“Marina Bay is Singapore’s Canary Wharf. In the 1980s, London started to repurpose its docklands. The Asian metropolis followed suit in the new millennium, when it began to develop a 360-hectare patch of reclaimed land. The Marina Bay Financial Centre and Asia Square added a few million sq ft of offices to the new central business district (CBD). Yet, the neighbourhood is already looking full,” he wrote.

In fact, data from Savills shows that the vacancy level of Grade A office properties in Marina Bay is just 2.3 percent as of Q3 2022, while that in Raffles Place stands at 8.3 percent. At the same time, office rents there reached S$12.3 psf per month, which is 25 to 60 percent higher than Singapore’s other major office submarkets.

There’s still potential to construct more office space in Marina Bay, with the authorities planning to release an additional 1.7ha at the outskirts of the CBD, next to another site that has been released under the Government Land Sale (GLS) Programme.

However, the focus of these mixed-use sites are condominiums, as Singapore is facing a greater shortage of residential units, with rents of private homes surging by about 33 percent year-on-year.

“A cyclical shortage may have been unavoidable given the speed with which Singapore’s reopening attracted money and talent. More problematic would be a structural deficit of condos and offices,” Mukherjee explained.

This is why the Singapore government wants to decentralise and is poised to release a 6.8ha site in Jurong Lake District (JLD) that will generate 1.08 million sq ft of commercial space, including offices, under GLS H1 2023.