The return of size.

Singapore closed 2025 with S$33.68 billion in real estate investment sales, 16.8 percent above the prior year, with the third quarter alone contributing more than S$10 billion, a seven-year quarterly high. The year ended with its largest cheque: Keppel REIT’s S$1.453 billion purchase of a one-third stake in Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 3. Around it sat CapitaSpring at S$1.05 billion and the Jem office component at S$462 million.

For three years the standard line on Singapore commercial property was that the market was sound but the cheques were small: rates too high, sellers unhurried, price discovery stalled. 2025 retired that line. Office investment volume alone reached a three-year high near S$4 billion.

What the year’s large transactions share is instructive. Each was a partial-interest or portfolio position in a core asset, sold by a holder with a reason, fund life, capital recycling, strategic exit, to a buyer with permanent or semi-permanent capital. None was distressed. The bid-ask spread did not close because sellers capitulated; it closed because falling financing costs let patient buyers meet unhurried sellers where they had been standing all along.

The MBFC Tower 3 stake is the emblem. A one-third interest in one of the two or three best office towers in Asia, transacting at roughly S$3,268 per square foot, is the market stating its reference price for the irreplaceable. Every CBD asset now marks against that print.

We expect the composition of 2026 to tilt further toward this pattern: fewer, larger transactions; balance-sheet buyers over leveraged ones; and partial interests in trophy assets as the instrument of choice for capital that wants Singapore exposure without an operating burden.

Size has returned to the market. Urgency has not. That combination, large cheques written slowly, is historically the healthiest state this market knows.

Zaiwealth advises principals on commercial and investment-grade transactions in Singapore, including partial-interest positions.