THE FLUCTUATIONS OF LEASEHOLD DISCOUNTING AND THE ESTIMATION OF LONG-RUN DISCOUNT RATE

Abstract

Residential leasehold contracts are an important feature of the Singapore real estate market. Despite their wide use, they remain complex contracts, that involve long-run calculations by both sellers and buyers. In this thesis, the pricing relationships in this market was used to quantify the leasehold discount relative to a freehold. The contribution of this paper is to go beyond the average effect that has been studied in previous research and to exploit both time series and spatial variation, so as to understand the preferences and behaviour of market participants. The main results are established via a semi-log regression model using transaction data of non-landed private residential property from 1997 to 2016. This approach also enables the estimation of long-run discount rates for leasehold tenure properties in different contexts, and across different segments of the market. Using these estimated discount rates to test the relationship between long-run discounting and short-term changes in short-term monetary policy, it was discovered that short-run interest rate has minimal effect on the long-run discounting factor.