SINGAPORE AMONG MOST EXPENSIVE PLACES TO BUILD

Singapore has been ranked third among the most expensive places to build in Asia. According to a report published by Property Report Asia,  construction costs in Singapore are just below that of Japan and Hong Kong.

The online report noted that construction prices in Asian countries have risen much higher than western countries in the last twelve months. For Singapore, the rise was fuelled by an increase in demand for construction in the tourism, commercial and residential sectors.

What this means is that private property prices in Singapore are likely to increase further in the near future. Property prices are already at an all-time high in Singapore. According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), it inched up by 2% in Q2 2011, over the previous quarter.

The following graph shows the movement of URA’s residential price index by property type. No matter which category of private housing – Condominium, Apartment, Terrace, Detached or Semi-Detached – prices have headed skywards since Q1 2009.

There goes my dream of living in a private property when I get back to Singapore.

I have been getting my dose of property news from Property Report Asia because the website specialises in real estate news. It is an online version of a property magazine, just more interesting because it is multi-media. An excellent example of media convergence in News 2.0, the website offers stories in electronic print, video and podcasts. You can also subscribe to its RSS feed to get regular story updates.

What I really like about the website is that it focuses more on providing opinion and analysis pieces to help readers make sense of property news rather than churning out news reports. There are just way too many websites reporting the same thing in cyberspace. At Property Report Asia, experts share their views on latest developments in the property market and provide free advice for investors.

In terms of design, the website has a neat two-column layout, with a list of stories on the left and secondary information on the right. Each story is clearly demarcated by a picture, a bolded headline and a one-line description, which makes it really easy to scan through the page to pick out stories to read.

What I don’t like about the website is that it does not provide hyperlinks to sources or reports that had been quoted in the stories. In terms of navigation, the website could be improved by having intuitive “next” and “previous” options so that readers can easily go to the next story in the same section. It can also faciliate better discussions among readers by offering comment voting and comment threading.  

With more people getting news online, some academics are already lamenting that newspapers might be a thing of the past soon. I wonder if the same would happen to magazines seeing that more specialist websites such as Property Report Asia have also sprung up over the last few years.