Malaysians are still the second-largest group of buyers of Singapore’s non-landed residential properties by nationality year-to-date, according to an article in the Star today.

Singapore-based property consultancies Cushman & Wakefield and Savills quoted Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) saying Malaysians were the second-largest group after the Chinese for the first half of 2019.

Cushman’s research head Christine Li said the top-five nationalities buying into Singapore’s private housing were the Chinese (440 units), Malaysians (283 units), Indians (152 units), Indonesians (116 units) and Americans (65 units) for the first six months of 2019.

Savills research and consultancy executive director Alan Cheong said, “Buyers from China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia remained at the top of the list in the April-June quarter.

According to the report, price growth in the second quarter suggested that the market had stabilised a year after buyers across the board were hit with additional stamp duties, with foreigners having to pay an additional 20% stamp duty from July 2018 onwards.

The most interesting development was that foreigners whose nationalities were not specified topped the overseas charts for the first time in history, with a total of 260 non-landed private residential transactions in the second quarter of 2019, a sharp increase of 128.1% quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q).

Unspecified foreign buyers rose even further to a total of 331 units for the July-August period.

This unspecified foreign category, said Cheong, refers to those who buy new uncompleted units from developers.

“They are all lumped under this category called ‘foreign unspecified’,” he said.

He believed that Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Indian buyers would feature strongly in this category.