Retail vacancy could rise amidst supply influx

Ground floor rents in key areas could lead the gradual recovery amidst sustained flattening out of rents.

Singapore’s retail space vacancy could increase amidst the large supply influx in 2018, Colliers International said. The trend could go down however, with landlords discounting high retail rents for higher occupancy.

Colliers International noted that Singapore’s retail space supply was replenished by 226,000 sq ft across the island which could be tapered off over 2019 to 2022. The firm expects as much as 851,000 sq ft added to the supply from 2018 to 2022.

“We expect yields to remain largely flat over 2018 through 2022, with room for further yield compression,” the firm noted.

The retail rental market generally remained soft in H1 2018 as overall Central Region rents slipped 1.7% YoY in H1 2018, according to the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Also read: H igher spending fails to boost retail rents from protracted slump

According to Colliers International, Orchard Road ground-floor rents stayed flat YoY at $40.39 psf pm during H1 2018, whilst the regional centres saw a marginal uptick of 0.3% YoY to $33.50psf pm which marked some stabilisation in ground-floor rents.

“We expect ground-floor rents to lead the gradual recovery, but overall retail rents should continue flattening out and stabilise over 2018 to 2022 as sector headwinds precipitated by e-commerce have not materially subsided,” they commented.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia