Inside Asian Gaming

April 2010 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 33 MICE in Singapore tag and this, they say, could affect demand for Singapore.” Sim Beng Khoon, Director of Travel and Hospitality Business for the STB, said in response at the time: “If the situation is prolonged, then it could potentially impact demand. Tour groups could opt to go elsewhere or meeting planners could move their events out of Singapore.” Between 2004 and 2006, only 386 rooms were added to Singapore’s inventory of gazetted hotel rooms (from 30,300 to 30,686). That’s an increase of only 1.3%. Yet during that same period, the annual number of tourist arrivals increased by 21%, from 26.7 million to 32.3 million. In 2007, the number of available gazetted hotels in Singapore (i.e. hotels excluding small guest houses and serviced apartments) actually went down (from 103 hotels to 98 hotels), and the number of available rooms fell by 601. This was due to a combination of factors: refurbishment of existing properties and demolition of others as a by-product of the better rental yields available to developers from office buildings. The government tried to solve this hotel room supply problem in 2007 by zoning extra land for hotels and offering it to developers under the Government Land Sales Programme (GLS). The developers, for the most part, said ‘no thanks’. In that year, eight of the ten land plots designated for up to 5,850 extra hotel rooms under the GLS were rejected by developers and carried over unsold to 2008. Of those, six were vacant and available for immediate development. The reasons cited in the industry for the low take up were the undesirable location of some sites, timing risk and credit availability. Supply of Gazetted Hotels and Hotel Rooms,2004-2008 112 108 104 100 96 92 32,500 32,000 31,500 31,000 30,500 30,000 29,500 29,000 No. of Hotels No. of Rooms Source: STB Annual Report on Tourism Statistics 2008 2005 2004 30,300 102 30,445 103 2006 2007 2008 Number of Rooms Number of Hotels 30,686 103 30,087 98 32,000 109 For years, Singapore property values have been overwhelmingly driven by the office sector.