Debated in Parliament on 7 Jul 2014.
Mr Yee Jenn Jong asked the Minister for Trade and Industry whether the Ministry will provide a national data bank on commercial rentals, including effective rents with variable components, and, if so, when.
Since April 2014, the Government has released more detailed rental data on retail and industrial space through URA and JTC respectively. URA has released median rentals of retail space by street names, while JTC has released average rentals of Multiple-user Factory space by planning regions. All the additional information is available on the URA and JTC websites.
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The Government has announced that we will work towards publishing more detailed rental data for retail space by the end of 2014. This will add to the existing information available on the rental market and help businesses make more informed decisions during lease negotiations.
Mr Yee, we only have two minutes, so make it very short.
I thank the Minister of State for the answer. First, I would like to ask whether the Ministry agrees with the staff paper that was recently published by the Ministry that REITs do not impact the rents in the retail sector. Secondly, is there any target that the Ministry is setting to try to keep the retail rent rises to a more manageable manner? Is there any internal KPI that the Ministry is planning to achieve with all the measures it is taking?
For the benefit of the Member Mr Yee, I have also mentioned in public before that REITs have some signalling effect for the landlords and developers around the area when the rental increase or decrease happens. So, there is some signalling effect although REITs in themselves are not a dominant factor or may not be a dominant factor in the influence of all in the market itself. But we do recognise that there is a signalling effect.
As for monitoring of the rental changes, we are monitoring very carefully and that is exactly why before the end of the year, we want to make sure that we publish the rental index – more detailed, more specific, make it clearer – so that the tenants and landlords can make more informed decisions when they do their lease negotiations. I think the principles behind this, whatever measures and approaches that we roll out, is to make sure that there is a fair practice and they would enhance the business practice that will help the market as a whole.
Order. End of Question Time. Ministerial Statement. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs.
[Pursuant to Standing Order No 22(3), provided that Members had not asked for questions standing in their names to be postponed to a later Sitting day or withdrawn, written answers to questions not reached by the end of Question Time are reproduced in the Appendix.]
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