THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE COLLECTIVE SALE INDUSTRY

Abstract

A collective sale also commonly known as en bloc sale is a situation whereby individual owners in a development band together collectively to sell their properties as an entity to a single buyer. The main interest of the buyer is the ownership of the piece of land rather than the existing development. The key objectives of this thesis are to determine the factors that could affect the collective sale industry and to determine if the collective sale industry is sustainable by way of measuring the number of collective sale transactions.

Using the number of collective sale transactions during a semi-year as the measure of sustainability, the thesis used a statistical model – the ordinary least square to examine how the sustainability depends upon various macroeconomic factors including the government land sale, development charges, gross domestic product, housing demand, foreign direct investment in real estate and residential property price index. A 10 years period from1997 to 2007 is studied. The estimates show that the gross domestic product, housing demand and property price index have a positive impact on the number of collective sale transactions. This is in contrast to government land sale and development charges which have a negative impact on the number of collective sale transactions. Lastly, there is no significant correlation between foreign direct investment in real estate and the number of collective sale transactions.