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Is Ang Mo Kio the best mature estate for property investment?
Despite the rain, the show gallery of The Panorama was packed with attendees.
With lower average prices and higher rental yield, coupled with a well laid out master plan for rejuvenation, properties in Ang Mo Kio have been marked to perform better than their counterparts.
by Gordon Tay
Most property-related searches are conducted according to the various regions in Singapore and of course, include popular mature estates. This was the main topic at the recently concluded PropertyGuru Guru Talk seminar held at the The Panorama show gallery.
Guru Talk is a series of property knowledge empowerment seminars aiming to provide the Guru View to property seekers. The edition held on 13 May 2016 saw Guru Talk-er and industry expert, Marcus Oh, Executive Director of OrangeeTee.com, share his insights on the charm of mature estates and the potential cream of the crop among them.
Understanding there might be doubts on what makes a mature estate, Marcus opened his presentation by providing attendees with a clear definition of the term.
“How do you define a mature estate? The first qualifying factor would be that it must be at least 30 years old. The estate must be self-sufficient. It must have strong transport infrastructure coupled with many supporting amenities. Also, in any mature estate, residential developments must be a main component. These estates also typically come with industrial clusters that provide job opportunities,” he said.
Pre-empting the thoughts of many attendees, Marcus then went on to try to validate the oft-held view on the value appeal of properties in mature estates, with key points surrounding existing demand, space constraints in Singapore, and their popularity due to amenities and transport infrastructure.
He said, “A very simple reason for the appeal is because there will always be demand due to the readily available amenities mature estates have. Knowing that Singapore is a very small island, there lies the problem of space constraints.
“This is especially so in mature estates, where there is not much land left for future developments or expansion. The government recently said in a news article that the supply of residential housing will not be enough to meet this demand. Everyone wants the best, but Singapore is only so small.”
To give attendees further insight into how properties in mature estates compare with one another, Marcus went on to walk attendees through a series of statistics. These stats compared the average prices, rental transactions and yield in four mature estates — Ang Mo Kio, Toa Payoh, Bishan and Yishun.
“Zooming in on the four main mature estates, Ang Mo Kio, Toa Payoh, Bishan and Yishun, we see that 99-year leasehold projects in Ang Mo Kio average at about $1,200 psf, while in Bishan and Toa Payoh, (the figures stand) at about $1,500 psf and $1,400 psf respectively.
“Looking at rental volume, we see that Toa Payoh leads the way, followed by Bishan and Ang Mo Kio. Toa Payoh remains one of the most popular estates for rental; however, this could be largely due to supply. While we see Ang Mo Kio placed third in rental value and volume, behind Toa Payoh and Bishan, it ranks the highest in terms of returns, or rental yield.”
Indicating that Ang Mo Kio could be seen as the cream of the crop among the four estates for property investment, he wrapped up his session by sharing with attendees the master plan in place, which could potentially result in more value for properties in the estate.
Four lucky attendees were selected for a complimentary fengshui talk at the end of the seminar. Attendees of the hour-long talk spoke positively of the insights they managed to gather about fengshui.
To have a full account of what was shared at this Guru Talk seminar, please watch our videos at bit.ly/MatureEstate
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 | This article was first published in the print version The PropertyGuru News & Views. Download PDF of full print issues or read more stories now! | ||
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