SINGAPORE – Knight Frank’s Prime Global Cities Index for the second quarter of 2016 listed Singapore as ninth with the highest increase in luxury home prices, notably those of new condos. It spiked reaching 7.9 percent in the year to June 2016. The top five percent of the wider housing market in each city corresponded resulting in this statistic.

Vancouver tops the list with a surge of 36.4 percent on their high-end homes. The inflation is expected by the Canadian government to drop after they have implemented a new tax system for foreign purchase last August 2.

Shanghai ranks second in Q2 top performers with a 22.5 percent hike. Other cities with the highest boost in luxury home prices include Cape Town (16.1 percent), Toronto (12.6 percent) and Sydney (10.2 percent). Also on the list are the cities of Tokyo, Guangzhou, and Seoul.

Knight Frank revealed that most of the top ten cities are undergoing new cooling measures for real estate properties over the past year. According to the property consultancy firm, the latest move of policymakers in Vancouver which is to pass a 15 percent tax on foreign purchase has been done already by some Asia-Pacific countries.

“Hong Kong and Singapore, most notably, have added 15 percent additional buyers stamp duties, while the Australian states of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales have also recently introduced various additional levies for foreign buyers,” said Nicholas Holt, Knight Frank’s Asia Pacific Head of Research.

“Conversely, liberalization is the flip side of protectionism; whilst we have seen foreign buyers penalized in certain markets, in Vietnam and Indonesia for example, we have seen policymakers go the other way with recent moves to relax rules for non-nationals,” he added.

Hong Kong takes the title from Taipei for being the weakest-performing residential market in the world as of the second quarter. This came out due to the 8 percent drop in luxury home prices while supply has increased and issues with economic slowdown continue.

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