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The retail sales index (RSI) (excluding motor vehicles in chained volume terms) fell by a slight 2.4% year-on-year (y-o-y) to 98.0 in November 2020. Retail sales performance improved in the month, led by prominent large-scale sales events such as 11.11 and Black Friday on digital platforms. Prior to these events, many brick-and-mortar stores also started going virtual with establishments such as Isetan and Metro selling their products on platforms like Lazada, and BHG setting up their own shopping site. This resulted in increased online sales in November, which accounted for about 16.7% (excluding motor vehicles), or some S$516.4 million of the total retail sales amounting to S$3.1 billion. Of these, majority of the retail trade mainly comprised transactions of Computer and Telecommunications Equipment, Furniture and Household Equipment, and Supermarkets and Hypermarkets.

From Q4 2020 to 2024, some 53.8 million sq ft gross floor area (GFA) of industrial space is slated to be completed. Of these, about 43.2% of the upcoming supply is expected to be completed in 2021, with a significant proportion being multiple-user and single-user factory spaces. Coupled with the phased withdrawal of government fiscal support for businesses, multipleuser factory prices and rents are likely to come under pressure, falling by not more than 5% in 2021 while single-user factories could fare slightly better.

• The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated a number of secular shifts that were already starting to have fundamental impacts on the role real estate plays in the economy as well as in investment portfolios.
• Such disruption increases the need for evolving data and analytics to understand the rapidly changing drivers of performance and risk consistently across all types of real estate investments.
• Despite a long list of difficult questions facing the asset class, climate change and its impact on risk and return are more important than ever for real estate investors.

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Overview

Conducive global developments placed financial markets on a risk-on mode in the final month of 2020. The prospect of widely available coronavirus vaccines, the US bipartisan agreement on fiscal stimulus, and the EU-UK post-Brexit trade agreement’s conclusion provided the necessary fillip to sentiment, sustaining momentum for real estate stocks to conclude on a positive note. However, for the whole of 2020, real estate stocks continued to lag the wider equity markets, which have been supported by tech and pharma counters. Property cycles will eventually chart its own way out of the crisis, which although historically lags an economic recovery, will be longer-lived, sustained by the region’s enduring structural fundamentals.