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Peggy Sito

Chan, Chau snap up luxury Singapore flats
Still on the subject of property investments, the attractions of Singapore's  market have evidently tempted movie superstar Jackie Chan and Taiwan-based singer-songwriter Emil Chau Wa-kin  to fork out millions of Singapore dollars on property deals in the island state.
Chan is believed to have picked up three units making up an entire floor of the upmarket Centennia Suites, while Chau went for a three-bedroom apartment. Their purchases were all on the mid- to high floors of the 36-storey condominium on the former Kim Seng Plaza site, the Business Times reported.
The total costs of the four units was about S$10 million (HK$55.5 million).
The two visited a showflat last Friday when they were in town for a charity function.
Analysts say prices of luxury houses in Singapore are in line for a boost after the opening of the Universal Studios Singapore theme park on Sentosa Island.
Doomsday notes
Repent. (Or at least sell your house. The end is nigh!)
Ah Pak has read a doomsday article on the timeline for the collapse of China's property market that is being circulated in the online world. The article compared the property market in Japan from boom to bust over the period from 1985 to 1991, to China's market over the three-year period so far, from 2005 to 2008.
The unidentified author of the report wrote that the three-year period in China showed many similarities in terms of both property price growth and economic growth with the first half of Japan's boom cycle from 1985 to 1998, and predicted that these parallels will continue, leading to a bursting of China's property bubble in the beginning of 2011.
For example, the writer said, China was now wrestling with problems such as  rising home prices, pressure to revalue its currency, a high savings rate and a low consumption rate - all identical to what was happening in Japan two decades ago. China's property market, ipso facto, will collapse next year. 
There are many similar dire warnings circulating on the internet, some written by reputable analysts, and it will be just 21 months or so before they are proved wrong. Or maybe right.
Rental crunch
Meanwhile, those soaring  home prices on the mainland  have spawned some innovative solutions to making housing affordable to people unable to get on board for the ride.
Media reports say  some landlords in Guangzhou have turned containers into homes for low-income groups. And in Beijing, an enterprising 78-year-old Huang Rixin has partitioned a room of less than 200 square metres into  capsules, each little more than the size of a 'coffin', which he plans to rent out at 50 yuan (HK$56.78) a month each. He rented three rooms and turned them into eight capsules.
 Huang said his capsules included an internet connection and would provide accommodation for young graduates before they got a job or upgraded their living conditions. 
 But either Huang's business acumen is  not as sharp as his  innovative approach to alternative accommodation,  or those graduates he hopes to find as tenants might want to return to university to take an elementary arithmetic course.
Huang  told reporters that he paid a rental of 650 yuan a month for the three rooms and after investing 30,000 yuan to do the partitioning, he was now looking for  capsule tenants at 50 yuan a month. 
It doesn't seem to add up, does it?



Ah Pak