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How a Singaporean millennial got rich on the UK property market

With a day of house viewings ahead, Germaine Chow sits intently scrolling through her pale pink smartphone, swiping through floor plans with a gold-tipped manicure. Her eyes flash and she tilts her head. Maybe the two-bed corner flat overlooking Canary Wharf in London, or the top floor, split-level three-bed a few miles away in Wapping? Next to her, her husband, Shawn Lee, sits scrolling just as ferociously. The couple are fresh off an overnight flight from Singapore and today is all about landing a housing deal. But unlike many millennials struggling to get on the property ladder, these two are not searching for their first flat.

Chow, 35, a former model and Singapore Airlines stewardess turned self-made millionaire and darling of Tatler Asia, has already bagged about 500 apartments across Manchester, including in Deansgate Square, Vista River Gardens and Victoria Riverside; a further 500 units in London — Aspen in Canary Wharf and the Green Quarter in Ealing. Plus more than 100 more around Birmingham in locations including Glasswater Locks and Snow Hill Wharf. In fact, she’s particularly hyped about Brum.

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Chow with the owner of a studio in Green Quarter, Ealing

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

“Birmingham is such a beautiful walking place,” she says, breaking into a smile through flawless make-up. “We love Brindleyplace and the Learning Quarter. It’s such a young person’s city and everyone’s so friendly. In Asian cities no one talks to each other, but here you get in a lift and people say, ‘Ooh, cool outfit.’ ”

Chow co-founded the multimillion-pound Singapore-based investment group Crestbrick, which helps mainly Asian buyers purchase property, and British cities are her favourite place to do business, she says. The group has already bought 1,200 buy-to-let flats in the UK and today she’s acting as a guide for a 130-strong group of potential new investors she’s flown in from Singapore. Most of them are middle-class families keen to invest in a property that will give them a return to fund their pension or pay for children’s school fees.

“They’d say, ‘What is Birmingham?’ and, ‘What is Manchester?’ People only know the football clubs. But they are great, clean cities with an art scene, and people need to know,” she says. “I tell them we’ve never had a bad deal here.”

How buying with a friend could get you on the property ladder

Indeed, in less than five years Chow has facilitated £420 million worth of buys in the UK for her clients, many of whom have come to her via an investment advice platform that Chow also founded called I Quadrant. And because she buys in bulk and off-plan, she gets in ahead of the local market and can also get a discount of up to 10 per cent off the eventual sale price.

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Chow with her husband, Shawn Lee, top left, and investors at Aspen, Canary Wharf

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

“Property investing is a team sport,” she says. “Through strength in numbers we can have a predictable win, both for buyers and developers.”

That Singaporeans regularly come to the UK to snap up properties at a discount — even while thousands of young Brits are being hammered by eye-watering rents and struggling to find a deposit for their first home — is not new. This year, about 30 per cent of new homes sold across England and Wales will be bought off-plan, according to David Fell, lead analyst for Hamptons estate and lettings agents, and 10-15 per cent of these will be sold abroad, mostly to buyers in Hong Kong, Singapore, India and mainland China.

Developers sell overseas, Fell says, because there are a limited number of UK buyers who will purchase a home well before it’s built, often because they are already paying rent and can’t afford to put up the kind of sums needed and wait.

Housebuilders, meanwhile, want to sell as much as they can off-plan.

“For developers, housebuilding is an expensive business, so any money they can bring in before the project is finished means development loans can be paid back sooner,” Fell says. “Developers want money up front to help cashflow. For some of them, if they cannot move the units, the whole regeneration stalls.”

For this reason, sales teams from developers such as Berkeley Group, Peabody and the Manchester-based Renaker visit Singapore as well as Hong Kong to sell at sales conferences. Chow says that when UK developers come to Singapore to sell to her investors, they might shift 100-150 off-plan units in one show, six months before they reach the domestic market.

Berkeley Group and Renaker declined to comment on this practice, but Peabody, a non-profit housing association, says it uses income from such sales to part-fund the building of social-rent homes elsewhere. In March last year, Renaker — which has received more than £500 million in loans to build developments since 2016 from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), chaired by mayor Andy Burnham — was marketing flats to buy-to-let investors in China, including those at the 51-storey Contour tower, a development in New Jackson near Manchester city centre. Press releases promised Asian buy-to-let investors that, “Rents in Manchester keep increasing with huge demand.”

Rent for young Britons has risen by £3.5bn over two years

Typically, Chow says, her Singapore investors need to put down a 20 per cent deposit, and mortgage deals can be arranged at home or through building societies and banks such as Skipton and HSBC to finance the rest.

This is the third time Chow has hosted a purchasing group expedition, taking families to see new-build sites with excursions to the Harry Potter experience in Leavesden and the National Football Museum in Manchester also on the itinerary. Her experience as a former flight attendant — corralling hundreds of demanding passengers — is perfectly transferable for these Monopoly tours.

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Chow’s investment group viewing a penthouse in Manchester

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

“You’re moving a lot of people, normal families. They bring their toddlers and grandparents and they are here to invest or see a place they bought off-plan that’s now finished that they can rent out. It’s very exciting for them,” Chow says.

After our meeting at Novotel London Excel, where the 130-strong group are staying to be near new developments in east London, Chow cajoles everyone onto the Docklands Light Railway and in and out of reflective vests and hard hats to view sites in Woolwich, West Ham and Dagenham. The buildings don’t yet exist here, but the dreams are very much alive.

“Document new beginnings! Experience local culture!” Chow narrates into a camera for her social-media feed, as her tour group, young and old, gather round scale models of their future buy-to-lets.

Back in Singapore, the Chow-Lees own a £4.1 million, seven-bedroom house where they live with their retired parents and their two children, aged 11 and 9. But they can’t expand their empire in their home city due to taxes on second homes. “We cannot own more because stamp duty is 24 per cent of the sale price on a second home, and you can pay more than a third in tax on rental income,” Lee says.

Even though they are in charge of a multimillion-pound venture now, 12 years ago they were cleaned out financially after investing in an online scheme that turned out to be run by a fraudster. Having met aged 23, when Lee advised Chow about her website, within three years they had two children, a small government-supported flat and £20,000 in shared savings. Taking a friend’s advice, they placed money in a scheme that promised a progressive return over time. However, the money vanished.

“It was our fault,” Chow says. “We had no control. We were putting money into a scheme blind. That’s why we like property. You own it and the laws are clear.”

Shortly after this first setback their web development business also folded. The next day Chow got a job selling insurance. “When you’re a parent, you get on with it.” Soon after came the couple’s first game-changing property deal. They clubbed together with friends to raise £60,000 to buy a unit in Singapore for £438,000, paying a deposit of 20 per cent.

“Within a year we had bought four more industrial properties, leveraging them against the other,” Lee says. “Each made £80-90,000 in profit when we sold it, after giving back what we owed friends.”

They looked to expand and were immediately drawn to the UK because of its reliable and relatively open property laws and an aggressive rental market, which promised cashflow and relentless demand. They bought their first properties in Manchester on Crown Street in 2019, a one-bed flat in Victoria Residence that was completed in 2020 for £240,000 and a two-bed in Elizabeth Tower for £320,000 — both off-plan — through Renaker, which was building homes on a former car park and warehouse space in Deansgate. “Six years ago, Deansgate was an empty car park,” Chow recalls. “We saw the potential — there was a university, there were jobs, there were big business headquarters being set up. We saw it had promise and were among the first to buy.”

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The couple bought this property in Elizabeth Tower in 2019

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

Both units were successfully let by a local estate agent. The rent in 2019 for the one-bed unit was £900 per month; today it is £1,600 per calendar month.

“The past five years, the property prices in Manchester? It’s crazy,” Chow says. “It showed us what the UK market was like. We knew if we stuck to big developments where we can get in early, we would be OK.” According to Zoopla, since 2018 the average rent in Manchester (now £1,120pcm) has risen by 41 per cent; London (£2,190pcm) by 27 per cent; and Birmingham (£980pcm) by 34 per cent.

What do they think about the rental crisis in these cities for locals struggling with the cost of living? Is it fair that she is cashing in? Chow is having none of it. In fact she believes she is a great and fair landlady. She whips out her phone to show me a gallery of smiling UK tenants she has visited and given cookie baskets.

“You’d be surprised — £1,600pcm is not the highest there,” she says. “We prioritise good tenants rather than money. If good tenants want to stay longer, we give them two years at a discount. We encourage other Crestbrick investors to behave the same way.”

In Lee’s view, it is not foreign buyers who should be blamed for the housing crisis or high rents. He says it’s the UK system that is flawed. “The credit system has to change so that paying rent is accepted by lenders as proof you can pay a mortgage. In Singapore, loans are easy to get and you can leverage against your pension. It’s not that British people don’t have money; it’s that it’s either going on rent or locked away in their pensions.”

Private rented sector supply would need to increase by 227,000 homes a year to meet demand, according to the consultancy Capital Economics. Freddie Poser of PricedOut, the national campaign for affordable house prices, believes that any new homes being built offers relief.

“Rents are too high. By building more, rents will fall and these homes will be less attractive as purely financial investments,” he says. “Without foreign investors buying off-plan, it is conceivable that cities would have built many fewer homes.”

Chow’s “strength in numbers” also helps with the unpredictability of service charges, she says. Crestbrick group sizes mean they can demand agreements from developers on service charges in the first years of a building’s lifetime. And critically — through right to manage laws — they collectively own so many units on one site they can legally, as a majority group, win the right to govern their own service costs. The threat of this is usually enough to keep charges down, she says.

In the past year, some UK house hunters have found it easier to buy via Singapore than at home, Chow says. She describes how one Londoner had walked to a local housing development site and asked if he could buy a unit off-plan. “He wasn’t even allowed to talk about buying it at the site,” she says. “When the developer bought the land, they had entered into an agreement with us exclusively for a period of time. So that UK buyer joined Crestbrick and was able to buy through us at a discount.”

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Chow with actor Stephen Staley, one of her investors

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

Stephen Staley, 46, is another UK-based Crestbrick buyer. An actor and model, he was living in a new tower in Deansgate with a gym and pool — paying rent that recently went up from £1,500pcm to £2,200pcm, 12 months after the new landlord took it over — when he happened upon a sales conference being held in his building headed by Chow and her team.

“It was a reception for what I’d say were ‘international investors’, but Germaine was superfriendly and invited me in,” Staley says. “I told her I wanted to buy here but it had been hard. She said she was selling off-plan units in a new development and I could get early access.”

After a further online meeting with Chow, Staley put down a 20 per cent deposit on a two-bed flat nearby, worth £343,000, which he can move into when it is finished next year.

“A two-bed corner flat in a similar development nearby costs £500,000, so I think it’s a good deal,” he says. “Rental yields here are very high and competition for flats is so fierce that I moved into my current flat without even viewing it. There are about 1,500 flats in the new developments here and many are internationally owned. There are so many overseas investors making money in Manchester, you don’t want to miss out.”

While in London Chow landed a meeting in Westminster with Lucy Powell, the leader of the House of Commons and the MP for Manchester South, keen to discuss how Crestbrick could assist with future developments for local people and how UK citizens could learn from I Quadrant to buy their own home. “We had great conversations about building communities and the power of collaboration — what Manchester has always done.”

Powell’s office did not provide comment. While in Manchester at a Top Gun themed event under the fighter jets at the city’s Imperial War Museum, Chow also donated £10,000 to Andy Burnham’s Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity.

Chow’s first visit to the UK in 2011, when she was 21 and still working for Singapore Airlines, was very different. In those days she lived on instant noodles and free hotel biscuits to save cash and sat alone in Hyde Park — “It was free,” she says — and, while she window-shopped on Bond Street, she would buy in Primark.

She credits her drive to make money to her mother, Connie, who worked in a local car dealership to support Chow and her brother while her father drifted in and out of their lives. Eager to teach her own children the value of money, Chow often insists they travel in economy while she and her husband work close by in business.

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Chow and Lee at Glasswater Locks, where units sell from £275,000 to £625,000

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

Chow started earning for herself at 15 after landing a job as a model, as well as being a promotional girl selling cameras and beauty products at sales events. “I offered to manage all the other girls as well — making sure they sold the products in the best way, managing their toilet and lunch breaks. Aged 16 I was like, ‘Hurry back from your break,’ and, ‘Remember to smile, please.’ I was already a bit entrepreneurial.” There followed the job at Singapore Airlines, which she did for three years before becoming self-employed.

Many international property investors are secretive, hiding behind tax haven-listed property companies, but the Chow-Lees say they want to be out and proud about their lucrative business. They want to educate the world, especially people in the UK, about how to do it themselves through their I Quadrant courses. Their two-day flagship programme, Property Investor Mastery, costs £220. “Why aren’t we taught about things like mortgages and interest at school?” Lee asks. “The one decision in life that can make a drastic difference and no one tells you about it until you’re actually buying a house.”

Are foreign investors taking over the property market?

By Melissa York, Times assistant property editor

First-time buyers will see Singaporeans on spending sprees and think, “How am I meant to compete with that?” But the truth is that middle-class buyers like those who attend Germaine Chow’s UK tours mostly only own one or two buy-to-lets to shore up their personal wealth.

For an Asian buyer, an investment property in the UK is appealing because we’re seen as a stable country, with a strong legal system and a state that isn’t likely to seize assets. Not as enamoured with period features as us, overseas buyers see new-build homes as low maintenance and secure, as many of them come with flashy amenities.

Selling off-plan is great for housebuilders too. Development loans come with eye-watering interest rates — as high as 20 per cent — but if developers sell a chunk of properties before they are built, the project will be seen as less risky and they are more likely to be able to finance building the rest of the homes at a lower rate. Without these early-stage sales, lots of new housing would not get built — and there would be even fewer homes for first-time buyers.

So why aren’t developers selling off-plan to UK buyers? It’s harder than it sounds. UK buyers want to physically see the property before they spend, or they need to sell their present home before they commit to buying another one and they can’t afford to rent while it’s being built. Overseas buyers, on the other hand, particularly Asian ones, are used to buying on the strength of the figures on a spreadsheet.

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A £240,000 flat in Victoria Residence, Manchester

COURTESY OF GERMAINE CHOW

The number of new homes bought by overseas buyers increased by nearly 6 per cent in the first half of 2024. The number of European buyers has fallen 9 per cent in London since Brexit. They have largely been replaced by buyers from Asia: about 40 per cent of these purchasers are from India and 34 per cent are from mainland China.

But it is an exaggeration to say that overseas buyers are snapping up all our new homes. It’s also a myth that whole developments are regularly bought by buy-to-let investors. Banks like developments to be bought by a mix of owner-occupiers and investors because there is less chance everyone will sell up at the same time, and will put a clause in the developer’s finance deal that limits the number of flats sold to investors or stipulates a certain percentage must be owner-occupiers.

This is little consolation to would-be first-time buyers, but rising rents are a big part of the reason they cannot save enough to buy a home of their own. Propertymark, a membership body for estate agencies, predicts rents are set to increase by 27 per cent in 2025.

The main reason for this is a dire shortage of private rentals. The average letting agent has a third fewer homes to rent than it did before the pandemic, property portal Zoopla reports.

This is partly due to UK-based landlords who bought in the Nineties buy-to-let boom selling up as they reach retirement age. Rising mortgage rates and the costs of keeping up with new regulations also mean it’s less profitable to be a landlord than it used to be.

International buyers, on the other hand, can often buy outright with cash. The marketing consultant TwentyCi’s figures show that private rental instructions by overseas landlords are up by nearly 10 per cent this year.

So are these buyers the bad guys? It’s not that simple. Asian investors may see our new homes as glorified savings accounts and that may be abhorrent to some people. But they also finance new homes and provide much-needed rentals for people who can’t afford to buy.