Wednesday 1 June 2016

Weathering a Property Downturn (Ku Swee Yong)


Ku Swee Yong, author of books such as Real Estate Riches and Real Estate Realities, returns with this book for the current climate. The book has opinion pieces interlaced with recent articles from late 2014 to early 2016 to support the theme.

The contents cover ground on the recent climate for residential, commercial and industrial properties. There are also chapters covering defensive moves, Ku's predictions, conditions in ASEAN and also strong arguments for investmet in Japan. Ku strongly argues for a negative scenario in Singapore and advises generically on what an investor in properties should do; however, do not expect details or tactics as the book is focused more on the macro trends and directional strategies. The book's title is slightly misleading from this angle.

The book is easy to read and numbers are not very heavy, although statistics appear often in the book. There is also a very nice ratio of new opinion pieces to dated published articles; I recall his previous books having many previously published articles which made the books very quickly outdated. Overall, it took me less than half day in total to finish reading this book.

The book is good in giving readers a feel for the property situation, but I believe that it will become outdated in one to two years' time.

Recommended: Yes

Found in NLB: Yes