Daily Briefing: Land hunger revives bloc sales; Supermarket spending continues to grow

And more Singapore construction firms is set to venture overseas.

From Bloomberg via Yahoo!: Chalk up another sign Singapore’s housing market is recovering: redevelopment deals are back. After slowing to a trickle the past three years as housing prices fell, four redevelopment deals -- where a group of owners band together to sell entire apartment blocks at a hefty premium -- have been struck already this year, with a combined value of S$1.5 billion ($1.1 billion). The process, also known as “en-bloc” sales, allows developers to knock down and rebuild in a city where new residential land sales are tightly controlled by the government.

From Shares Investment via Yahoo!: Amid a challenging economic outlook for 2017, Singaporeans could see tougher times ahead. In February 2017, Singapore’s Department of Statistics reported that families across all income groups saw their earnings rise at a slower growth rate for 2016, as compared to the previous year. A month later, a survey by recruiting company, Hays, revealed that about 46 percent of Singaporean employers expect to give salary increases of between three and six percent, down from 52 percent during the last salary review period.

From PropertyGuru: The number of overseas projects secured by local contractors and consultants doubled from 289 projects in 2014 to 594 in 2015, showed the Building and Construction Authority’s (BCA) Construction Export Survey 2016. This comes as more Singapore firms ventured overseas in 2015 at 62 consultancy firms and 38 contractors, up from 26 consultancy firms and 22 contractors during the previous year. Singapore construction firms mostly expanded into India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and UAE. Despite the rise in overseas construction projects, the total value of overseas contracts secured remained stable at S$1.74 billion in 2015.