Singapore Office Rents Down 8.5% In Q4 2020

SINGAPORE – Compared to the same period in 2019, office rents in the city-state declined by about 8.53 percent during the prior quarter, according to the 4th Quarter 2020 real estate statistics published by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on Friday morning (22 January 2021, SGT). That exceeded the 3.13 percent year-on-year slide seen in Q4 2019.

On a quarterly basis, office rents in Singapore fell by around 3.48 percent in Q4 2020 versus a 4.50 percent quarter-on-quarter drop during the third quarter. At the same time, prices of office space dipped by 3.1 percent compared to a marginal gain of 0.24 percent in Q3 2020.

Year-on-year, offices in the city-state suffered a larger price contraction of roughly 10.79 percent during the last quarter of 2020, versus a much smaller annual decline of 0.57 percent in Q4 2019.

In terms of office vacancy, it reached 11.8 percent in Q4 2020. While this is slightly better than the 12.0 percent seen during the previous quarter, it’s still higher than then 10.5 percent recorded in Q4 2019.

Another positive is that the nett amount of occupied office space rose by 2,000 sq m (21,528 sq ft) in Q4 2020, compared to a drop of 19,000 sq m (204,514 sq ft) in the previous quarter. But it’s still lower than the 30,000 sq m (322,917 sq ft) of office space occupied in Q4 2019.

At the end of Q4 2020, overall supply in the pipeline reached around 770,000 sq m (nearly 8.29 million sq ft) in gross floor area (GFA) versus 767,000 sq m (8.26 million sq ft) during the prior quarter and 753,000 sq m (8.11 million sq ft) in Q4 2019.

Notably, all the year-on-year percentages were obtained by comparing the 4th Quarter 2020 real estate statistics with prior data published by the URA.