Why the bottoming office market in Singapore is good news for Keppel Land

China home sales jump too.

According to Nomura, the bottoming office market in Singapore and the pick-up in China home sales are good news for KPLD, whose NAV is 26% represented by Singapore office assets (including those held under KREIT) and 39% represented by China residential assets.

KPLD has four projects in Chengdu (with about 4,500 units left to sell, on our estimates), which has been identified by fellow developer CAPL as an important market for expansion. 

Here's more from Nomura:

Following the recent pullback in share price, KPLD now trades at a discount of 44% to our NAV estimate of SGD6.26/share, vs the average discount of 32% the stock has traded at over the past five years. 

While the stock has underperformed the other developers thus far this year, we note that the bulk of the underperformance emerged after the purchase of the Kim Tian Road site in late April.

The concern thus appears to be that the price of SGD550.3mn (or SGD1,163psfppr) KPLD paid for the site may have been too high, especially with potentially higher interest rates.