Chart of the Day: Singapore REITs' average occupancy rates dip to 95%

In particular, retail and office S-REITs saw the largest drops in occupancy rates.

This chart from SGX shows that the average occupancy rate of Singapore's real estate investment trust (REIT) sector, excluding hospitality REITS, dipped marginally to 95% as of 31 March 2021 from 96% as of 30 March 2021, with pandemic-hit segments such as retail and office S-REITs seeing the largest dip in occupancy rates of 2.1 and 1.9 percentages points (ppt), respectively over the year.

On the other hand, the rise of work-from-home and e-commerce provided tailwinds for the industrial and data centre segments. These two sub-sectors attained year-on-year growth in average occupancy rates of 1.4 and 3.1 ppt, respectively.

In addition, 12 of the 15 acquisition announcements made during the first five months of 2021 involved industrial, logistics, or data centre assets.

Amongst the nine SGX-listed industrial and data centre REITs, AIMS APAC REIT (AA REIT) (+6.0 ppt), Keppel DC REIT (+3.1 ppt), and Mapletree Industrial Trust (+2.2 ppt) saw the most improvement

AA REIT, with a portfolio occupancy rate of 95.4% as of 31 March 2021, holds a variety of assets including logistics & warehouse, business park, hi-tech space, light, and general industrial properties, SGX said.