Come home: Indian developer targets Singapore’s NRIs
Come home: Indian developer targets Singapore’s NRIs
Thousands of expats live and work in the city-state
To property developers based in India, wooing Singapore’s ever-growing Indian community from afar may not be enough to increase their share of this increasingly lucrative market.
Mumbai’s Godrej Properties opened on Wednesday an international representative office in the city-state. “To be physically present in Singapore will enable us to market our properties, mainly residential properties, more effectively to Indians in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong,” Mohit Malhotra, executive director of Godrej Properties, told The Straits Times.
Non-resident Indians (NRIs) have a high disposable income, he said. “They actively invest in India, so we would like to tap the opportunities in Singapore where there is a large Indian community with strong cultural linkages between Singapore and India.”
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This development comes on the heels of the Singapore government signing a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh to develop an integrated township in Shimla.
The Indian diaspora is a ballooning market, with 350,000 expatriates working in various sectors in Singapore. Around 250,300 Singaporean citizens have Indian ethnicity, making up 7.4 percent of the city’s populace, according to the Singapore Department of Statistics.
The developer has another overseas representative office in Dubai, where Indians make up the largest non-Arab investors in the property market, according to the Dubai Government Land Department.
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Source: Property Report