, Columnist
Singapore Property Awaits Its Sail Moment
The launch of the waterfront condo ended a seven-year slump in 2004; a similar revival in animal spirits isn't on the horizon.
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Almost exactly 13 years ago, Kwek Leng Beng, the billionaire chairman of City Developments Ltd., then Singapore's biggest builder by market value, did something outlandish.
Together with partner AIG Global Real Estate, he launched Sail@MarinaBay, an ambitious, 245-meter-tall waterfront skyscraper in a market that was down 45 percent from its 1996 peak. The city-state's home prices, ravaged first by the Asian financial crisis and then by the SARS epidemic, would rise between 5 percent and 10 percent annually for seven years, he predicted.