Apartment Choice

From July 1, NSW doubled the stamp duty on foreign buyers to 8 per cent. THERE are nascent signs Chinese foreign buyers have toned down their enthusiastic buying of Sydney property . There are three pinpointed causes. Firstly, Beijing has narrowed the window for capital outflows to Australia. At the same time, Australian banks have tightened lending criteria to mainland China investors due to APRA regulatory requirements , and in some cases won’t lend to foreign investors at all. This week Chinese local and international estate agents reported a sharp drop-off in sales over the last six weeks as new property taxes took effect after the NSW state budget . From July 1, NSW doubled the stamp duty on foreign buyers to 8 per cent and increased the land tax surcharge from 0.75 per cent to 2 per cent. Chinese local and international estate agents reported a sharp drop-off in sales over the last six weeks. It’s a little too early to say the allure of Australian property has gone, b...

I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

(Sea view from the private rooftop pool of a six-bedroom penthouse at Cape Royale in Sentosa Cove. Photo: Ho Bee Land) Expensive as they may be, the new generation of penthouses on sale here are gaining a lot of traction with property buyers. But just how much does a penthouse cost today and what are the attractions to living in one? Over in prime district 10, Sun Tongyu, co-founder of Alibaba, paid $51 million for the sole penthouse spread across 13,573 square feet on the top two levels of Wing Tai's freehold Le Nouvel Ardmore two years ago - the biggest amount paid for a penthouse in Singapore at the time. SC Global Developments recently smashed that record when it sold the 10, 300 sq ft super penthouse at Sculptura Ardmore for more than S$60 million or in excess of S$6,000 per square foot. The luxury residential developer could set another record when it finds a buyer for the 17, 642 sq ft penthouse on the top three levels - 23, 24 and 25 - in the Signature Tower at Th...