As investment from Chinese investors dwindled last year, Singapore rose to be the largest Asian investor in U.S. commercial real estate.
Data from Real Capital Analytics and Cushman & Wakefield show that Singaporean investors spent a total of $9.5 billion on U.S. properties, while Chinese investment dropped 66 percent to $5.9 billion, Bloomberg reported.
It was the first time since 2012 that Singapore outspent China.
Sovereign wealth fund GIC accounted for nearly 75 percent of Singapore’s dollar volume, including a 95 percent stake the fund bought in 60 Wall Street in a deal that valued the 50-story office tower at $1.1 billion – one of the few billion-dollar sales of the year.
“We expect Singapore to continue to be the single largest source of Asian investments in the U.S. real estate markets,” said Cushman’s Priyaranjan Kumar, executive director of the firm’s capital markets for Asia Pacific.
Singapore ranked as the No. 3 biggest investor worldwide in U.S. commercial real estate behind Canada and France. The city-state’s investments in commercial real estate around the globe climbed by roughly 40 percent to $28.4 billion in 2017, surpassing the record year of 2015. [Bloomberg] – Rich Bockmann