MINISTER for National Development Khaw Boon Wan has taken to his
blog, Housing Matters, to respond to the errors and inaccurate
figures used in a recent Business Times (BT) article.
In the post published on Saturday, titled 'Startling But False',
he corrected the errors made in the Business Times article. He
wrote: 'I have been in MND for 5 weeks, and not sleeping well. I am
working my guts out to try to calm the market, for the good of all
Singaporeans.'
In the article published on Thursday (June 30), the Business
Times wrote that the Design, Build and Sell Scheme (DBSS)
developer's profit margin for Centrale 8 was 76 per cent. Mr Khaw
says the actual profit margin would be 26 per cent and pointed out
several of the Business Times' calculation errors.
Here is an excerpt of the post (carried exactly as it is on the
blog):
'For example, it quoted a land price of $82,222,000 and a
maximum GFA of 721,188 square feet for the project. Both figures
were wrong. The correct figures were respectively $178,128,000 and
682,385 square feet. This was a huge difference of almost $100
million. The errors led to a gross over-estimation by BT of the
developer's profit and gross profit margin.
'Based on these figures alone, the profit margin would have been
26%, not 76%. But even the reduced figure was wrong, as the article
had excluded key cost items such as financing, marketing and
administrative costs. These are significant costs and when
included, would have further lowered the profit margin for all the
DBSS projects listed in the article.'
-- ST
