Are property investments really tempting you?   In a manner of saying, one simply cannot be blamed for feeling that way, particularly when the flood of good news from the stock market boom points to where it typically ends: the property market.   As after all, haven’t cash-flush investors through the ages just known a single aphorism?  A property investment is actually an investment in one’s future. It is what maybe famous Noble Prize winning economist John Maynard Keynes called as defeating the dark forces of time and ignorance by the skilled exercise of investment in safeguarding our future.

And so with bank interest rates - ‘courtesy’ of the global financial ruin sweeping the world – at historic lows, stock prices have undeniably appreciated to a high rarely seen in a long time.
 
Singapore’s STI Index (the benchmark for measuring stock market performance) has appreciated by more than 25% since the beginning of the year. So if one takes the multiplier effect to its logical conclusion with property investments and divestments figuring as its foremost considerations the puzzle falls neatly into place: the property whilst always moving in tandem with the equities also enjoys an attendant boom too.
 
Yet another reason explaining the onrush of investors could well be that people may significantly be well-heeled since the last ‘paroxysm’ in 2000, according to a point raised by property concern, Jones Lang LaSalle’s head of Southeast Asia research Chua Yang Liang as reported in the Straits Times dated 12th July.
 
And just feeding into the frenzy is Singapore’s introduction of the Interest Absorption Scheme (IAS) where a buyer pays 20% of the purchase price upfront and becomes its owner immediately. Significantly, the scheme allows an investor to assume a bank loan at purchase time, but it is the developer who bears the interest. And the attraction of the IAS gives the property market sustained sustenance, some have argued.
 
So like the Keynes maxim of shielding against those ‘dark forces’ the future is not mortgaged but secured lock and key.
 
As matters stand a whole new slew of properties are slated to be launched this year even as the year is not out yet. With the burgeoning foreign population slated to rise with the return of good times characterised by the possible return of repatriated expatriates who ‘ditched’ the country during the financial turmoil, the ‘party’ is far from over. Coupled with revelations last year in the country’s newspapers of a 22% jump in millionaires the proverbial party as they say, may just even be beginning.
 
So by any stretch of imagination, bets on the property market only makes it the best bet for now if one is either cash-rich either by striking out in the stock market or elsewhere.
 
Interestingly, what is instructive about the entire bonanza now unfolding before our eyes- as opposed to command economies where every manner of economy activity is regulated and controlled in a vice-like clamp – they follow a certain sequence in how the order and nature of things is coordinated? Boom follows a bust and bust follows suit, in typical alternating fashion.
 
Like an over-stretched athlete in need of a therapeutic sop, the property market has emerged from its convalescence which dogged it between 2002 and 2006.
 
The time now is to get back into the centre of action; away from the periphery where we have all stood watching from.
 
For as is too often said the natural progression of bust has always been followed by boom. And so long as we live in a capitalist, monetarist society the theory that Russian social scientist Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratieff first propounded back in the 1920s will continue to tell us when and where we need place our bets.
 
The time now therefore, is to look at the property market, because its ‘cousin’; the equities market is gyrating.
 
Victor Verstier is a Singapore-based free lance journalist.