In Part 1 of this series, I covered some of the analysis I have for the rental market in Singapore. In that article, I discussed the general trend in the rental market in terms of transactions in the first 8 months of 2020. If you are curious which districts have strong rental demand, and also which district seems to be showing an uptick in rental transactions over the course of this year, I suggest you take a look at Part 1 first before proceeding with the rest of this article.
In this second part, I will continue to cover more analysis on the rental market in Singapore and also highlight some of the interesting trends/facts about specific condominium projects in Singapore (eg. which condominium project has the highest volume of rental transactions for the first 8 months of 2020?).
Continuing where we left off the other time, I like to now focus on the comparison of the median monthly rental costs across the various districts to provide a ranking of the various districts based on the median monthly rental costs.
Based on the transactions in the first 8 months of 2020, here is the ranking table.
So, you have your usual suspects for the top of the list. District 4, which encompasses Sentosa Cove, takes the top spot here and I think this is well within expectations since you have Sentosa Cove included. The other 2 districts occupying the top 3 on these lists are District 9 and 10. Again, nothing special here since they are your Orchard, River Valley area. If we put our attention to the bottom of the list, you would see District 17, 28 and 25 occupying the bottom spots. These districts are Changi, Yio Chu Kang and Woodlands respectively. Probably some good data to have if you are on the lookout to rent a private property and wondering how the monthly rental cost differs from district to district.
Next let's look at the comparisons of median rents across the various number of bedrooms. After computing across 54000+ transactions, here is the figure.
From the figure above, you can see that the monthly rental cost for private properties with 3 bedrooms and less seems to be within a rather tight range of 2,400 SGD to 4000 SGD. Once the number of bedrooms crosses 3, there is a huge jump in the monthly rental cost as the median monthly rental cost for 4 bedrooms is around 7,000 SGD. So, some food for thought here if you have a big family and are wondering what is the size of private properties you should be renting. There seems to be a big difference between 3 and 4 bedrooms- I suspect it's also due to the fact that private properties with 4 bedrooms and above are usually penthouses and hence the higher rental cost.
Let's now dwell a bit deeper into the individual private condominium projects and do some comparative analysis between them.
Perhaps, let's start off with understanding which are the top private condominium projects with the highest number of rental transactions.
If you are wondering which are the top 15 private condominium projects with the highest number of rental transactions in the first 8 months of 2020, here is the chart.
The top project with the highest number of rental transactions is The Sail @ Marina Bay. It is also the only project which crosses the 400 mark for the number of rental transactions for the first 8 months of 2020. Parc Riviera is a close second. That's actually interesting as Parc Riviera is located in the West Coast area and not in any of the CBD districts. In fact, it's not even really near to any MRT station. Yet, it is still a very close second in terms of number of rental transactions.
You may also notice that these top 15 private condominium projects all come from very different districts in Singapore. In fact, there isn't really a dominant district here with a high number of projects on this list. This could point to the fact that rental demand here is not all concentrated within the CBD districts like what some of us might have thought.
If you were to segregate this list of projects into CCR, RCR and OCR though, you would then notice that there is quite an overwhelming number of projects in the RCR districts in the list. In fact, more than half of the projects in the list are from RCR districts. So perhaps RCR districts do enjoy some good rentability based on what's gathered in this list.
After comparing the number of rental transactions across the various private condominium projects, you might be wondering what are the top private condominium projects with the highest rental costs.
Now, here is the list of the private condominium projects with the highest median rent in Singapore.
There isn't really much of a surprise here as most of the private condominium projects here belong to the CCR districts. And it should be rightfully so. I would be worried if these projects come from the RCR and OCR districts instead as that could have represented something very wrong here. So this list is more of a fun fact here to show you where the most expensive places in Singapore to rent an apartment are. If you have 22,200 SGD to spare on a monthly basis, you could really consider the Hana.
I hope all these data and analysis across these two parts in the series have given you much insights in the rental market in Singapore. If you are looking to buy a private condominium to rent out to potential tenants, it might be now worthwhile to look at some of the RCR or even OCR districts which are starting to see some uptrend in rental demand as demonstrated across various examples in this series. If you are looking to rent a private condominium and wonders which district/room size fits your budget, I hope you have obtained your answers in this article.
In case you are looking for more data specific to a certain area or private condominium project which I did not cover in this series, feel free to join my patreon page and I will be more than happy to provide more information.
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