Daily Briefing: OCBC warns of not-so-cheap S-REITs; What you need to know about StarHub's recent payout

And should you buy or rent a home in Singapore?

From Yahoo!: OCBC is maintaining its “neutral” recommendation on the S-REIT sector as it projects overall DPU growth for the financial year to fall. For the S-REITs under OCBC’s coverage, overall DPU growth came in positive at 2.4% y-o-y in the Jan to March period, a reversal as compared to the five straight quarters of flat to negative DPU growth. “Looking ahead, within our coverage, we project overall DPU growth for the current financial year to decline by a market-cap weighted average of 0.2%, partly driven by Ascott Residence’s rights issue announced in March,” says lead analyst Andy Wong in a Monday report. For the next financial year, OCBC is projecting a 2.8% growth in DPU.

From The Motley Fool Singapore: StarHub’s chief executive officer, Tan Tong Hai, reiterated the telco’s dividend guidance for 2017 in his opening speech,“… we’ll declare an interim quarterly dividend of $0.04 per ordinary share for first quarter and we intend to pay a quarterly cash dividend of $0.04 per ordinary share for full year 2017, for financial year 2017." But questions remained over the sustainability of StarHub’s dividend. In particular, analysts were looking for the telco’s dividends to be supported by its free cash flow.

From Zuu Online via Yahoo!: The perennial rent vs buy argument has no simple answer. One way of looking at this question is to ask yourself whether you can afford to buy a home. Property that costs a million dollars would require you to put up about S$250,000 as an initial contribution. Can you afford this? Taking a “buy” decision also means that you will see a large part of your monthly income going towards repaying your mortgage. This will go on for the next 25 years or more. In other words, you will have to live with your home loan repayments for practically your entire working life.