It's payback time: Property investment sales finally jumped 19.9% to $4.73b

After 2 boring quarters.

Analysts must have been yawning themselves to extreme boredom while keeping an eye out for any significant movement from Singapore's investment market these past 2 quarters. Here's something to jolt them awake now: It just jumped 19.9% to a whopping $4.73b.

According to Savills, in Q2, thirteen state land parcels, comprising four residential sites, eight industrial sites and one commercial site, were sold under the GLS programme and brought the public sector’s investment value to S$2.03 billion. 

Here's more from Savills:

This represents a 12.2% decline from a quarter ago. In contrast, private sector investment transactions rose by 61.3% QoQ to S$2.63 billion in the April to June period.

The substantial increase was mainly due to a few large deals in the commercial segment, including Equity Plaza (S$550.0 million), a 92.8% stake in Prudential Tower (S$512.0 million), Changi City Point (S$305.0 million) and Cecil House (S$110.0 million).

After two quiet quarters, the investment market has awakened from its slumber with a total of about S$4.73 billion of investment sales recorded for the second quarter of 2014, up 19.9% from S$3.95 billion in Q1/2014 and 21.7% from $3.89 billion in Q4 of last year. 

Despite positive growth in the first two quarters of the year, the outlook for real estate investment market remains uncertain for the rest of 2014 due to continuing concerns over yield compression, cooling measures and rising interest rates.

The full-year investment volume will be weighed down further with fewer GLS sites sold compared with a year ago. The fillip in this is the copious amounts of acquisition capital which has been building up during this period of low activity and this may have to be deployed sometime in the not too distant future.