Don't expect more Grade A offices in CBD till 2016

Rents have already bottomed.

Barclays hosted a lunch with industry experts CBRE with 10 investors on 16 November to discuss the Singapore office segment.

Here's more from Barclays' lunch meeting:

Prime office rents have bottomed. Overall, CBRE’s Moray Armstrong thinks Singapore prime Grade A office rents have bottomed; and that there is really not much new Grade A supply in CBD for the next few years until 2016.

However, he thinks rents are unlikely to move up significantly as he has yet to see a Financial Institution (FI) take up significant new space, which has typically marked the inflection point in the previous downcycles.

So far, the absence of FIs has been made up for by smaller occupiers across a diversified range of businesses which include Energy, Commodities, Professional Services/ Legal, Maritime, Insurance – eg, the number of lawyers has doubled over the past five years, and the size of a law firm has increased from average 10,000 sqft six years ago to 19,000sqft.