Daily Briefing: Home developers bid more aggressively; Singapore calls for Asian submarines to join naval conduct code

And here are the top five dividend blue chips in Singapore.

From PropertyGuru via Yahoo!: The spike in new home sales following an easing of property cooling measures saw more developers aggressively bidding at land auctions in Singapore. Cushman & Wakefield revealed that the number of developers bidding per land tender rose from 8.3 in the second half of 2005 to 13.3 during the first four months of 2017 – paying a 29 percent premium on average or the highest level in at least five years.

From Bloomberg via Yahoo!: Asia-Pacific navies should extend a code of conduct to submarines to reduce the risk of accidents among the 250 underwater vessels expected to be operating in Asia by 2030, according to Singapore’s navy chief. Extending the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea to submarines wouldn’t compromise the stealth capacity of the vessels, Rear Admiral Lai Chung Han said at a maritime security conference in Singapore Tuesday. The code, agreed in 2014, aims at curbing the chances of accidents at sea, and reducing the risk of escalation if an incident occurs.

From Motley Fool Singapore: The Singapore stock market is home to some of the highest dividends payers in Asia. I thought it’d be an interesting exercise for us to take a look at which are some of the top-paying dividend blue chips on our sunny island. The SPDR STI ETF – which mimics the fundamentals of the Straits Times Index – has a dividend yield of 2.88%, as of 11 May 2017. The index has 30 companies with varying yields. Using our data provider, I ran a screen to gain more insight into their pay-outs. Here are the top five stocks with the highest dividend yields in the Straits Times Index