JTC launches improved industrial property price and rental indices

JTC Corporation on Thursday released revised industrial property price and rental indices when it announced its fourth-quarter industrial statistics. These new indices come with an expanded coverage and improved methodology.

For instance, more sub-indices will be made available to show price and rental movements based on property attributes such as property type, planning region, land-use zoning and remaining tenure.

The indices will also expand their coverage to include single-user factories and business parks which they didn't use to before. They will also cover transactions island-wide, as opposed to only tracking those in the central region formerly.

The new methodology also groups properties with similar attributes and uses fixed weights in the computation of the indices, as opposed to changing weights (12-quarter moving average of transaction values) previously.

JTC said this prevents the indices from falling or rising drastically due to certain attributes of properties transacted in the quarter. For instance, a large number of freehold properties transacted in a quarter may skew the index upwards.

This comes after the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said on Wednesday that it is releasing more detailed data on rents for retail, office and industrial space through a multi-agency effort with the Urban Redevelopment Authority and JTC.

On Tuesday, the Fair Tenancy Framework was also launched by the Rental Practices Working Group of the SME Committee to help small and medium-sized enterprises negotiate fairer tenancy agreements.

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