Page 61 – Kanebridge News

February 2, 2023February 23, 2024

Best Schools In Singapore For Locals and Expats (2024)

Parenthood often means thinking three steps ahead. Education is one of the major milestones in a child’s development and getting them into a good educational institution remains one of the foremost priorities for parents.

Consistently positioned within the top five in the PISA Education rankings worldwide, Singapore is synonymous with being the premier education hub within the Southeast Asian region. The reputation of Singapore’s educational offerings brings forth large swathes of children of the regional elite prepared to spend to enrol them into the top schools in Singapore. This in part has also led to Singapore instituting distance-based admissions for junior schools because of the competitiveness as well as a desire to reduce travel times to school for students.

Distance-based criteria is only relevant for admission into local primary schools, and future students enrolling must be residing within a 1km radius of the school that they are intending to study at. To this end, the core of the elite junior schools still are concentrated in the areas of Districts 9,10 and 11, along the Bukit Timah Stretch.

Here’s our pick of the top 10 list of Best Schools across a range of qualities that they boast.

Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) (Primary/Junior)

This Anglo-Chinese School is famous for being name-dropped in Kevin Kwan’s movie-adapted book, Crazy Rich Asians. Its aim is to produce “gentlemen, scholars, leaders, officers and global citizens”, and the all-boys school has done so by counting at least three ministers in the current Singaporean Government among their alumni, as well as prominent business leaders such as Mr Phillip Ng of Singapore’s largest real estate developer Far East Organisation and members of the Shaw family. As one of the oldest schools in Singapore, its alumni extend deep into the generational networks of the old money in Singapore. For those seeking valuable connections for their child as they grow, this is one school to keep on your list.

Location: 50 Barker Road(Primary), 16 Windest Road (Junior), District 11 (Primary), District 10 (Junior)

Singapore Chinese Girls School (SCGS)

Situated right beside Anglo Chinese School Primary, the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School caters to the well-heeled crowd in the Newton Catchment Area. The provenance of its name speaks of its age and establishment as the first Chinese girls’ school in Singapore. SCGS Primary is known for producing alumni such as Mdm Halimah Yacob, the current and eighth president of Singapore. It is a non-denominational school. However, schools do not prejudice admissions based on faith and religion and participation in the school’s faith-based activities are by choice. SCGS has a secondary school section that gives it affiliation points off the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), as well as further affiliation to a pre-university institution, Eunoia Junior College.

Location: 190 Dunearn Road, District 11

Methodist Girls School (MGS Primary)

Even though MGS Primary is not located beside ACS Primary like SCGS, as a Methodist school, it is the sister school to the ACS. It is located slightly further down the road, in District 21, and like ACS, it boasts similar networking qualities that your child may stand to gain from. While it is not a specialised school for academics nor sports, MGS performs well in all domains and students develop and excel holistically, with alumni such as the late Kwa Geok Choo, the wife of the late founding Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew to Southeast Asian Games swimming gold medallists Joscelin Yeo and Nicolette Teo.

Location: 11 Blackmore Drive, District 21

Nanyang Primary School

Nanyang Primary School is nestled within a large cluster of desirable bungalow estates, the ‘creme de la creme’ of private real estate purchases you can make in Singapore. Many notable local celebrities like singer Stefanie Sun and prominent politicians, like Senior Minister Tharman Shamnugaratnam have sent their children to Nanyang. In fact, the current Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, studied at Nanyang Primary. Its illustrious alumni coupled with its reputation as the leading institution for bilingual education makes it a prime choice to plan for your child’s future enrolment. Bungalows in the area cost upwards of $20 million. However, this does not mean that proximity-based admission is exclusive to those that buy them, as there are plenty of decently priced apartments in the vicinity. For example, D’Leedon is an architecturally renowned apartment complex within a 0.71km radius of Nanyang Primary. One of the furthest apartments within the 1km radius limit is Leedon Residence, a luxury boutique apartment built in 2015, while one of the cheapest options available within the area is Spanish Village, though the cheapest apartment available is still a sizeable S$2.63 million.

Location: 52 King’s Road, District 10

Raffles Girls Primary School

Named after the colonial founding father of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, the institution’s senior divisions are famed for producing scholars including Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Raffles Girls Primary School is a junior institution popular among parents not just for its coveted name, but its high academic standards, having produced consistent highest scorers in the PSLE. While the ministry has shied away from proactively ranking schools based on academic performance and has instead pivoted to labelling all schools as “good schools” in line with the government’s meritocratic ideals, RGPS has an extensive teaching resource accumulated over the years and teaching staff that gives students a solid grounding in academic capability.

Location: 21 Hillcrest Road, District 11

Tao Nan School

Moving away from the Bukit Timah stretch of primary schools, Tao Nan School is one of the few schools that admitted Gifted Education Programme (GEP) students into their existing cohort. The Gifted Education Programme caters to the top 1% of the cohort and is aimed at further advancing students able to manage the academic rigour with more thought-based research projects. Selection for GEP generally happens in the middle of primary education at Primary 3, however, admission into the school at P1 is not a guarantee of admission into the program. Despite this, given that the teachers in the school are equipped with the resources to teach GEP students, this may translate to a better quality of education in one of the better educational institutions located in the East of Singapore.

Location: 49 Marine Crescent, District 15

Pei Hwa Presbyterian School

Pei Hwa Primary is a Presbyterian denominational school that has been accorded the Special Assistance Plan (SAP) since 1992. An SAP school “capitalises on its distinctiveness in its promotion and inculcation of Chinese values culture and tradition”. Pei Hwa has an Arts and Bi-cultural Enrichment program that deepens students’ appreciation of cultural goals. It is also a school with a long history, established in 1889, and is one of the schools along the Bukit Timah stretch that deviates from traditional sport-based Co-Curricular Activities such as Rugby and Swimming, instead having Chinese Dance and Chinese Drum as one of their anchor activities to reinforce a sense of cultural belonging and understanding at a young age. It’s a good choice for expat parents with Chinese roots looking to improve their child’s ability in bilingualism and enhance cultural appreciation.

Location: 7 Pei Wah Ave, District 21

Red Swastika School

Like Pei Hwa Presbyterian, Red Swastika School is also a SAP school, located in the East of Singapore rather than in the West/Central region. It also has consistent batches of students achieving an almost 100% pass rate in the PSLE, attesting to its ability to develop and nurture academic qualities in its students and has also been ranked by KiasuParents, a forum-blog on Singaporean education, as having one of the hardest Preliminary examination papers for the PSLE.

Location: 350 Bedok North Ave 3, District 16

Catholic High School (Primary Section)

Catholic High School boasts having the current Prime Minister of Singapore as one of its alumni (though he only enrolled at the secondary level), and the institution’s qualities can be best explained by PM Lee’s speech at the 80th Anniversary of the School just two months ago.

“They (the elder Mr Lee and Mdm Kwa) explained to me they chose it because it was a Chinese-medium school but it has high standards of both English and Chinese — bilingual. Also, it has strict discipline. Furthermore, it was a Catholic mission school.”

Location: 9 Bishan St 22, District 20

Rosyth School

Established in 1956, Rosyth School, like Tao Nan was one of the first few GEP schools that the government established for higher academically performing students. Given that there are only nine GEP Schools in Singapore, students that qualify for admission into the program are given the choice of enrolling in each of the nine schools at Primary 4. However, most of the schools are usually located within Districts 10,11, 21. Rosyth, therefore, caters to eligible GEP students in the north and central of Singapore, while Tao Nan caters for the East. Rosyth’s plethora of academic resources could benefit students by leapfrogging their cohort in their academic pursuits.

Location: 21 Serangoon North Ave 4, District 19

Beyond that, here are also some other considerations that you may wish to consider when purchasing a property near these schools. Kanebridge News spoke with realtor Clement Lim to understand more about additional factors that may affect your child’s choice of admission.

Kanebridge News: Are PSF (per-square-foot) prices significantly higher in areas with good schools?

Clement Lim: Yes. In my view, the three most important features of any private property is its location. This is especially so in land-scarce Singapore. On this small island, a good residential location almost invariably means being near reputable schools. This effect is compounded because good schools in Singapore are usually clustered together.

The reason for high per-square-foot prices near top schools in Singapore is a simple reflection of behavioural psychology and a hearty dose of Singaporean Kiasu-ism (Read: elitism or; meritocracy). Affluent parents fight tooth and nail to send their children to some of the best enrichment and to the best schools and will pay any premium for the convenience of their children. Like a competitive bidding system, prices of residential properties near good schools are therefore driven up by Asian parents’ weighty expectations of their children.

Where successful parents and bright students go, it also enriches the locality of any neighbourhood. It’s simple economics: purchasing power centres around a particular area, e.g Cluny Court near the aforementioned elite-school cluster, and top merchants follow. As a realtor, the most common question I get from buyers is, ‘what good schools are near this property?’.

KN: When is the right time to invest/purchase a property for the purposes of relocating and garnering admission to a primary school?

CL: Generally, it is recommended to purchase a property near your intended school before your child registers for the school.

However, a concession allows you to register your child for primary school using the address of a yet-to-be-completed property you have purchased. The vacant possession date (which means the date on which you can move in) must be within 2 years of your child’s entry into Primary 1, which usually is before your child turns 7 years old. This is a tad more complicated as it will require certain documents from you such as a Letter of Undertaking warranting that you will move into a said new property, as well as a copy of the original Sales and Purchase Agreement. It is more troublesome, but doable.

Credit: You may get in touch with Clement, our realtor lead for this article, at +65 9159 2011.

REA No: R065119B

November 19, 2022December 8, 2022

Australian design retailer Cult opens in Singapore

Lovers of interior design now have a new destination with Australian designer furniture retailer Cult opening its first store in Singapore today.

The store at 48 Club Street, Singapore represents Cult’s first foray into a ‘bricks and mortar’ retail environment in Asia, following on from six years of B2B activity in Asia.

Founded in Sydney by Richard Munao in 1997 as Corporate Culture, the Singapore Cult store located in the heart of the busy Chinatown district will stock familiar Australian brands such as Nau, Tait and Coco Flip, as well as Danish design houses including HAY, Gubi, Vipp and &Tradition.

Cult has been active in Singapore since 2017, with the team completing projects across Asia in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand, among others.

Much like the evolution from a trade-only business in Australia to a popular retail environment with stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, Mr Munao said the opening of the store in Chinatown is in response to repeated demand from clients to be able to experience and access the products for themselves.

“Our first six years in Singapore were dedicated to relationship building with key clients and increasing the Cult brand awareness within the regional design community,” he said.

“During the pandemic the rising demand for well-designed furniture for the home also led to a sharp increase in retail enquiries, sales and repeated requests from retail clients for us to have a physical store to visit.”

Business development manager for Cult Singapore, Ravi Shankar, said now was the right time to launch the business to the wider public with an eye for design.

“Affluent Singaporeans are willing to spend more to furnish their homes and businesses now than 10 years ago, when only the wealthiest individuals and corporations would consider ‘designer’ furniture,” he said. “Singapore also remains a gateway to South East Asia, with some of the best design work for the region being undertaken by firms in Singapore.

“This is likely to continue with the steady influx of talent and organisations from areas such as Hong Kong and Shanghai.”

November 18, 2022

‘SAD BEIGE’ HAS TAKEN OVER BABY GEAR, CLOTHING, DECOR

Krissy Kyne, a 27-year-old makeup artist in San Antonio, is giving birth to a baby boy this week. The room waiting for him at home is neither blue nor pink, but beige.

It has a light-coloured wood crib, a woven jute rug, a latte-hued changing pad and a cream ottoman, with oatmeal throw pillows and camel muslin blankets strewn about. Ms. Kyne said her mother-in-law told her her taste for neutrals looked “sterile,” but she has committed to the aesthetic, stocking drawers with beige onesies, beige sweatsuits and beige socks.

Ms. Kyne joins a wave of parents eschewing bright and stereotypically gendered colours for kid wares, and instead choosing earthy, neutral tones aligned with minimalism. It’s a look TikTok satirist Hayley DeRoche has termed “sad beige,” but some see it as a happy development: The ecru, blond and brown products fit right in with their stylishly muted décor in the rest of the house.

“Our whole house isn’t changing because we have kids,” said Jen Atkin, a celebrity hairstylist and entrepreneur in Los Angeles known for working with the Kardashians—although she conceded that the aesthetic can invite stains. Because she has two kids and three dogs, she bought easy-to-clean beige outdoor rugs and couches for her home.

Kylie Jenner showed off the beige furnishings in her son Wolf’s nursery in a video from March. Caitlin Covington, a content creator in North Carolina known online as “Christian Girl Autumn,” often dresses her daughter in brown and ecru ensembles for portraits.

“I’ve been influenced by influencers,” said Amina Kadyrova, a mother of three in New Jersey. “I’m a victim of the marketing system. But I genuinely like it.” Neutral colours are easier to mix and match on kids, she added.

Earlier this year, Baby Gap created a designated beige section inside some stores after researching market trends, according to the brand’s head designer, Carolyn Koziak. A new line from Walmart, Easy Peasy, includes a lot of beige, too. According to Etsy, searches for beige kids clothes jumped 67% in the past 12 months compared with the previous period.

“It seems to be marketing this fantasy that if I buy neutrals, my children will also be neutral, calm and quiet,” said Ms. DeRoche, the TikTok user, who lives in Petersburg, Va.

Most children’s companies still sell lots of toys and clothes in bright and inviting primary colours. “It’s important to expose kids to learning colours to help them with their visual perception,” said Ann-Louise Lockhart, a pediatric psychologist in San Antonio. “Having variety is important for brain development.”

Amanda Gummer, a neuropsychologist and children’s play expert in Britain, said there isn’t evidence that colourless toys stunt developmental milestones. Still, Dr. Gummer said, “the motivation of having an Instagrammable house and not letting kids explore and make a mess worries me. I don’t think many kids’ favourite colour is beige.”

Ms. Atkin said her children can get their colour fix elsewhere. “My son will go to indoor gymnasiums, play centres, museums, and he gets covered in slime and goo, and colour and glitter,” she said. “We do that outside of our house, and then we get to come home to a nice, calm, clean environment.”

Other parents noted the pacifying nature of neutrals. “Brown and beige make me feel calmer,” said Maddie Berna, a photographer and mother of two in central California. “I personally don’t like super bright colours, and they do wear that sometimes, but it’s annoying to see all the time.”

Ms. Berna’s mother, Ashley Durham, isn’t a fan.

“All of Ellie’s bows are the same kind of beige and I would like her to wear something that sticks out more,” she said, referring to her 15-month-old granddaughter. “I do try to buy them brighter color clothing. I just never see them in it.”

Naomi Coe, a California-based interior designer specialising in kid’s rooms, said she experienced an influx of beige requests during the pandemic, when many parents were spending more time at home.

“Neutral is going to give you calm, serene, homey, cozy,” she said. “I’ve noticed a shift where people are after that feeling more.”

Laura Roso Vidrequin, founder of secondhand kids-clothing marketplace Kids O’Clock in London, said beige products sell three times as fast as other colours on the site—perhaps because they are gender-neutral, she said, hence easy to pass down.

Elizabeth Robles Jimenez, a mother of four in Downey, Calif., said she bought plenty of pink and princessy products for her first three daughters before settling on beige décor and wooden toys for her 2-year-old, Ava.

“I think whites and creams give her an opportunity to discover her own self and not have the mentality that because she’s a girl, she needs all pink,” Ms. Robles Jimenez said.

Mushie, a startup that makes pacifiers, bibs and stacking cups in beige hues, has seen double-digit growth this year, according to its chief executive, Levi Feigenson. Moms cited the labels Oat, Soor Ploom, the Simple Folk, Tiny Cottons, Jamie Kay, Nora Lee, Rylee + Cru as others with an abundance of beige products.

“When I started my company [over 10] years ago, you couldn’t get a baby or child garment in a neutral colour unless you went to Europe,” said Marissa Buick, the Brooklyn founder of kidswear brand Soor Ploom. Her colour choices reflect ones “you won’t find in a shop, but are in nature,” she said.

November 18, 2022November 18, 2022

INFLATION, RECESSION FEARS HAVE SOME HOLIDAY SHOPPERS TRADING DOWN

Many shoppers are trading down to less expensive clothing and accessories—swapping Lululemon leggings for Uniqlo and expensive lingerie for Target bras and panties—as inflation eats into their disposable income and a rocky stock market erodes their wealth.

The downshift raises concerns about the coming holiday season, historically a time when many people splurge on designer handbags, fine jewellery and other extravagant purchases for themselves or loved ones. Investors will get updates on shopping attitudes this week when Ralph Lauren Corp., Michael Kors parent Capri Holdings Ltd. and Tapestry Inc., the owner of Coach, report their latest results.

“I’m skipping the splurge this year,” said Kate Cheng, who owns a jewellery store in San Francisco. Ms. Cheng said she normally treats herself to a designer handbag or another luxury item during the holidays, but is holding off this year over concerns about a looming recession.

She has noticed a shift in her customers’ buying habits in recent months to less-expensive silver jewellery from gold. That has prompted her to curtail her own spending. She switched to Uniqlo leggings instead of products from Lululemon, which cost about twice as much. She also canceled a trip to Maui, which would have cost about $4,000, and instead plans to take a road trip to New Mexico for about half the price.

Seventy-two percent of consumers plan to look for less expensive alternatives this holiday season as a result of inflation, according to a survey of 2,200 U.S. adults by Morning Consult, a research company.

With inflation at a four-decade high, consumers have been trading down to less-expensive groceries and other necessities for the better part of this year. Now, with the stock-market plunge of recent months further eroding the wealth of middle- and higher-income households, the penny-pinching is extending to more discretionary purchases.

Holiday retail sales in November and December, excluding spending on cars, gasoline and restaurants, is slated to increase between 6% and 8% from a year ago, after a 13.5% jump last year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group. The labor market is strong, and NRF expects some consumers will tap their savings and credit cards to deal with price increases.

U.S. consumers slowed their spending on luxury goods in recent months, according to credit-card data from Mastercard Inc., Citigroup Inc. and BofA Securities Inc. Spending over the summer and into September fell from the same period a year earlier, after posting double-digit percentage gains for most of the past two years.

Thomas Chauvet, who heads Citi’s Europe luxury goods equity research, said the slowdown was driven by a deceleration in transaction values, suggesting that even affluent consumers are trading down. According to BofA Securities, middle-income consumers, those making $50,000 to $125,000, slowed their spending the most.

Marc Metrick, chief executive of Saks, the online platform of the Saks Fifth Avenue brand, said customers with household incomes of about $100,000 are still spending but at a slower rate. These customers spent 20% more at Saks in recent months compared with the same period in 2021, but that is down from the 40% increase during the first six months of this year. As a result, Saks is selling fewer wallets, belts and other items bought by entry-level shoppers. “They are the canary in the coal mine for sentiment at that aspirational level,” Mr. Metrick said.

Jean-Marc Duplaix, finance chief for Gucci parent Kering SA, told investors in October that entry-level shoppers are buying less. “Among certain categories of products, which are maybe more appealing to a more aspirational clientele, there is some more pressure,” he said.

The slowdown has also hit American jeweller Tiffany, according to its parent, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. “The business in the U.S. is a bit less strong than it used to be,” but it is still growing at a double-digit percentage, Jean-Jacques Guiony, LVMH’s finance chief, told analysts in early October.

Kering and LVMH executives said some U.S. shoppers shifted spending to Europe given the strength of the U.S. dollar. LVMH said its overall business with American shoppers in the third quarter was similar to the first and second quarters of this year.

Mr. Chauvet said the U.S. slowdown in Citi’s data, which started in May, wasn’t the result of purchases shifting overseas because it captures spending by U.S. consumers regardless of their location.

Luxury brands have been among the most aggressive in raising prices. HSBC estimates the sector raised prices around 5% since April, on top of an 8% increase starting in September 2021.

David Hampshere, who owns a real-estate investment company, switched from Ralph Lauren button-down shirts to Costco Wholesale Corp.’s Kirkland brand earlier this year. “With the stock market tanking and mortgage rates rising, I’ve definitely been cutting my expenses,” said Mr. Hampshere, who is 55 years old and lives in Freeport, Fla.

Mr. Hampshere recently returned a pair of $300 noise-canceling headphones and is instead using an old pair that he already owned. He plans to give friends and family $30 gift cards this holiday season rather than the $100 cards he doled out last year.

Stacie Krajchir, 54, a publicist who lives in Los Angeles, has stopped buying Natori underwear and now gets her bras and panties at Target. “I don’t need a $110 bra,” said Ms. Krajchir. “A $12 bra is good enough.”

She recently returned a $300 blouse she bought at Nordstrom. “I can buy a blouse, jeans and a dress at Zara, and it still won’t add up to $300,” Ms. Krajchir said. She plans to trade down in her gift-giving, too. She is getting her sister one gift this year, instead of the five gifts she normally gives her.

Brett Glickman started swapping lower-priced items for high-end ones in her San Francisco boutique after she noticed consumers becoming more frugal in recent months. She is pulling $198 French silk nightgowns off the shelves and replacing them with $24 sweaters and $65 baby-doll dresses. “I had to flip about 30% of my inventory to less- expensive prices,” the former Levi Strauss & Co. executive said.

JCPenney and Kohl’s Corp. said they are seeing consumers switch to private-label brands, which tend to be more affordable than national brands. “They were definitely trading down,” Jill Timm, Kohl’s finance chief said at a conference in September, referring to Kohl’s shoppers.

Vered DeLeeuw, of Washington, D.C., used to buy most of her clothes at Bloomingdale’s, but has switched to Nordstrom Rack for its bargain prices. “Bloomingdale’s was my mother ship, but it is too expensive now,” the 51-year-old food blogger said.

October 21, 2022October 21, 2022

Beyond the Central Region: Best Places For Expats to Live in Singapore

Welcome to Singapore. Known for its political stability, multicultural and multiethnic demographic, Singapore grew from a tiny fishing town into a bustling financial hub that is a magnet for talents regional and international. A growing pool of expatriates flocking into the lion city only means one thing: real estate is heating up and getting more competitive. For those that have just recently received job offers to Singapore, fret not. Here’s a rundown of the best areas for expats to reside in Singapore.

Kanebridge spoke with a rising real estate agent in Singapore, Denyse Chong for her insights on these trends in Singapore.

District 9: Orchard, Cairnhill, River Valley

Not only are the properties in these areas near to the Central Business District (Raffles Place, City Hall etc), it also boasts Singapore’s famous Orchard Road Shopping Belt! Cafes, restaurants, eateries, and groceries are easily accessible when you need them, and work is only a short 20-minute commute away! Within District 9, River Valley would be my personal favourite. The Riverfront Lifestyle promises a very chill, relaxing environment that you’ll be excited to come home to after a day of work.

District 10: Bukit Timah, Holland

Expats with children will most likely bookmark this district as this is the place you’d want to be when considering education options for your adolescents. It is surrounded by elite junior institutions such as Anglo Chinese School, Raffles Girls, Nanyang Primary, to name a few. It is also home to the Singapore Botanical Gardens where you can bond with your family over picnics. It is slightly farther out than Orchard, but even then, reaching the CBD will take you no longer than 30-mins.

District 3: Queenstown, Tiong Bahru

Tiong Bahru is known for its “quaint little vibes” with walk-up apartments, shophouses and local coffee shops. You’re also inbetween either CBD, or the Telok Blangah offices. For some weekend fun, you can easily pop by Sentosa’s beach clubs for drinks.

What is the community vibe like in those areas you have recommended?

Depending on where and which part of those areas, it can be pretty fast-paced, especially during rush hours. More so for the dwellings along the Orchard stretch. Foot and vehicular traffic can get quite heavy at the end of the day.

Rivey Valley is a nice quiet neighbourhood. You would meet fellow expats at the cafés in the area having brunch on weekends after walking their dogs, or fellow neighbours going for a run or cycle along the Singapore River.

Queenstown and Tiong Bahru presents more of a local vibe with more public housing located in the area, compared to D09 and D10. If you’re looking to immerse yourself into local culture, this area can be very interesting too!

What is the ideal age of a property to purchase in those regions?

Depending on your budget. If it’s within your financial means, purchasing a BUC (building under construction) property/brand-new property directly from the developer will be better as there are lower risks incurred from progressive payment. You are also at lower risks amidst a hike in interest rates as your loan would be disbursed progressively and not in entirety. Alternatively, you can also consider projects that have just obtained completion, so the wait is less, and you can move in immediately.

If you’re in need of larger living spaces, I would recommend going for slightly older developments (10 years of age and above) as you would get more liveable space for the same amount of beds and bath layout. However, this is location subjective. Finding an older development may also command a higher premium than a developer’s new release due to prevailing PSF prices.

Should I rent or buy outright? Are there any significant barriers to entry for purchasing a dwelling in Singapore?

If you’re here for a short but good time, renting would be a better way as you get to explore a variety of properties during your stay here.

Barriers of entry for purchasing a property include the upfront cash on hand required amounting to 25% of property price, as well as the additional buyer stamp duties foreigners would be required to pay, above the property price, at 30%, payable in cash. This represents a huge quantum.

Freehold or Leasehold?

It should be pre-requisited on what your goals are. If you’re purchasing and intending to pass the property down to your children, I would say freehold. But if you’re intending to invest, leasehold is equally competitive. The returns on investment may even stand to be better than a freehold property too.

Is it more popular to stay within the city? (Or is staying within the city fringe an upcoming trend, if so, why?)

While I believe it used to be popular to stay within the city due to close proximities to the office, nowadays, staying within the city fringe is getting increasingly popular as well. Furthermore, City Fringe property prices are much lower than that within the Core Central Region (CCR). Our Public Transportation is reliable and cost-efficient. This allows for more expats to rent at city fringe places for bigger spaces at the same budget. (An equivalent 2-bedroom rental in the city would translate to renting a 3-bedroom in the city fringe). It is a consideration for Expats to want to “detach” from work by returning to their home slightly further away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

You may wish to contact Denyse for further assistance if you’re looking to relocate to Singapore for work.

Denyse Chong

(65) 97116664

R063810F

September 9, 2022

DO YOU NEED AN INTERIOR DESIGNER OR A MARRIAGE COUNSELLOR?

My husband James and I are decorating our new vacation house in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and have taken on so much more than we can chew that we’re choking…mostly because I’ve been a rude co-designer. Years of writing about decorating have turned me into the Joan Rivers of home décor, minus the comedy.

He wants wood, leather and black metal. If I don’t get white upholstery, one too many throw pillows and patterns as dainty as the pinnules on a maidenhair fern, I will perish.

When James texts me an image of a chair or light to consider, it’s often more masculine than I can bear—and I’ll text too brusquely why I hate it. My behaviour is not OK, especially because my spouse is one of the kindest souls on earth.

I’m not the only person whose style clashes with her partner’s as painfully as pink paisley and tartan plaid. “Disagreements between couples on residential projects is the leading reason our studio decided three years ago to pursue more hospitality and commercial projects,” said Dallas, Texas, designer Jean Liu. “Maybe we were unlucky, but we realized how unequipped we are to handle marital strife.”

It wouldn’t hurt an interior designer to bone up on strategies for couples-conflict resolution. In a 2021 survey by Houzz, a website and online community dedicated to home improvement and decorating, 11% of the couples among the 75,470 U.S. respondents declared they found it challenging to work with their spouse on a renovation. In the Houzz U.K. 2022 Renovations and Relationships Survey, 16% of 1,250 respondents said they considered separating during the renovation process.

When it comes to cohabitated spaces, the stakes are high, in part because your home is “an expression of who you are and your personality,” said Boston family therapist Terrence Real, author of “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship” (Goop Press, 2022).

Los Angeles designer Kevin Klein has found that when working with couples, disagreements are as unavoidable as shipping delays. Consequently, during initial consultations, Mr. Klein asks clients how they’ll handle any impasse that might arise. “They always look at me cross-eyed, like ‘What are you talking about?’ But that moment inevitably comes six months down the line, when we’re doing relationship counselling rather than designing.”

Real-estate developers Ilana and David Duel credit Mr. Klein for steering them through their own renovation harmoniously. “It’s really hard between husband and wife to make decisions,” said Ms. Duel. “You can spend hours and hours on just the tile.” She longed for an all-white house with light wood floors, while Mr. Duel and Mr. Klein sought to maintain the 1930s abode’s Spanish character.

Today, such unlikely roommates as a boxy, white marble coffee table—a nod to her taste—and drippy Murano crystal sconces—a reflection of Mr. Duel’s—are shacked up happily in the couple’s living room. “If you decide to hire a designer, know that they’re much better at designing than you are,” she said.

In case you don’t have the coin to take on a personal interiors pro, video design consultations offered by websites like the Expert, billed by the hour, can yield affordable tiebreaker advice. Decorist’s new service, for example, lets you book a 30-minute Zoom session with a pro for $59.

Whether hiring an expert or going it alone, Mr. Klein recommends you set up “office hours,” as he puts it. “When you come home after a long day, you don’t want to address these design decisions,” he said. “It’s not sexy; it doesn’t feel right.” Dedicating specific chunks of time to the process, periods when you’re both well-rested, is a better way to hear the other person’s side, he says, “than while you’re sitting in bed together watching TV.”

Another sanity-saving strategy: Choose décor that’s easily swappable. When Los Angeles designer Rydhima Brar’s client sought a swashbuckling 1970s-inspired graphic wallpaper, her other half didn’t find it shagadelic. The peace offering? Removable wallpaper they could switch out if he still balked down the line. Ultimately, he was into it.

Pictures, in these situations, are worth a thousand exhausting negotiations. “Most people don’t have the vocabulary to define their style,” said New York City designer Rozit Arditi. Gray Walker, a designer in Charlotte, N.C., often asks client couples to “pin” images of things they like on Pinterest boards, an easy ask, and then seek compromise with the help of those visual aids. “I have found that hearing both parties and giving each person a bit of what they want is the way to go without conflict,” she said.

For the living room of her clients’ 1930s Georgian revival home in Charlotte, Ms. Walker navigated warring aesthetics by acknowledging each—installing a Chinese screen and timeworn Oushak rug for him, an antique obsessive, and a bergère upholstered in faux fur as well as a minimal brick-red-velvet sofa for her, a fan of all things modern.

Seeking middle ground can lead to unexpected dynamism. When he first met his husband, Atlanta designer Vern Yip gravitated toward clean lines and Asian antiques. But his husband “brought a lot of European antiques into the picture that I never wanted and always felt kind of claustrophobic around,” Mr. Yip said. The happy medium they found was far from middle-of-the-road. “He had this dining table that had a ton of carvings. It was really well made but very old European. And we paired it with these Brno chairs—black leather and chrome—and it just sang, you know? They gave each other space.”

Pulling a common nostalgic thread from a pair of clients’ pasts helped PJCArchitecture find a design detente for the couple’s lakeside second home in Indian Lake, N.Y. Rob Maher, a retired Metropolitan Opera chorus member, asked for something resembling a Japanese tea house, while his wife, Deborah Allton-Maher, a retired Metropolitan Opera dancer and attorney, longed for the lusciously loggy cabin in the 1981 film “On Golden Pond.” After learning that the couple had toured Japan several times, the New York City architects found consensus in a shared memory of shou sugi ban (charred wood), a common feature of the country’s temples. The bridging fix: The architects sided a modern Adirondack pitched-roof house with the material. “We loved it,” said Ms. Allton-Maher.

Therapist Mr. Real’s bottom line: “You can bully your way and get what you want in the short run. But you’ll breathe in that solution in the long run, in your partner’s resentment,” he said. “If you frame it as a power struggle in which one of you wins and the other one loses, you both lose.”

I didn’t want my husband and I both to lose, so I (mostly) quit being a tyrant. I relented on two of James’s desires, a pair of leather-and-walnut chairs and channel-tufted leather bar stools. And you know what? They look great next to my white bouclé sofa and the Deco-ish barrel armchairs I chose in a cinnamon velvet—and I think they’re all destined to live happily ever after.

September 9, 2022

WHICH INVESTMENTS DO BEST—AND WORST—IN A RECESSION

We ran the numbers for seven recessions, and found a big difference between what fared well in the period leading up to recessions and during the recessions themselves

With academics, economists and pundits arguing over whether the U.S. is in a recession, many investors are wondering how to shift their portfolios amid the current economic uncertainty and its effect on financial markets.

If we are in a recession, what’s the best way to reposition a portfolio to maximise returns? And if this is just the lead-up to a recession, what then?

My research assistants, Zi Yang and Yuge Pang, and I decided to examine how various asset classes have fared leading up to recessions and during recessions—as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research—over the past 50 years. We studied the seven recessions in that period (1973-75, 1980, 1981-82, 1990-91, 2001, 2007-09 and 2020) and found that growth stocks led the way in the lead-up to recession. But, once we entered a recession, fixed income far outperformed equity, with international stocks providing the worst returns by far.

The asset classes we examined were U.S. high-yield bonds, U.S. long-term bonds, U.S. short-term bonds, U.S. total fixed income, U.S. growth stocks, U.S. value stocks, U.S. small-cap equity, international equity and U.S. large-cap equity.

In the nine months before the start of a recession, U.S. growth stocks delivered an average monthly return of 0.92% (a compound annualised return of 11.6%), followed by U.S. small-cap equity at 0.83% monthly (10.4% annualised). U.S. total fixed income averaged a monthly return of just 0.48% (5.9% annualised).

But in a recession, U.S. total fixed income averaged a monthly return of 0.62% (7.7% annualised), while U.S. growth stocks returned an average of 0.12% monthly (1.5% annualised). Returns were negative for every other equity class we studied.

Among the fixed-income classes, U.S. high-yield bonds are notable for having the lowest average monthly return of any of the asset classes we studied in the lead-up to a recession, at 0.14% (1.7%% annualised), and for being the only fixed-income class with a negative return during a recession, at a monthly average of negative 0.08% (minus 0.9% annualised).

On the equity side, international equity was easily the worst performer in a recession, at negative 0.93% a month on average (minus 10.6% annualised). That compares with an average monthly return of 0.80% (9.9% annualised) in the lead-up to a recession—the biggest difference for any asset class between returns before and during a recession.

The takeaway from it all, if history can tell us anything, is that once we enter a recession, the average investor best be prepared to head toward fixed-income assets and get out of international equities.

August 24, 2022

EVEN IN A TIGHT MARKET, BUYERS CAN STILL LAND PERKS IN NEW DEVELOPMENTS

When Ryan Wolitzer was looking to buy an apartment in Miami Beach late last year, several beachfront properties caught his eye. All were two-bedroom homes in high-end buildings with amenities aplenty and featured glass walls, high ceilings and an abundance of natural light. But only The Continuum, in the city’s South of Fifth district, came with a gift: a membership to Residence Yacht Club, a private club that offers excursions on luxury yachts ranging from a day in south Florida to a month around the Caribbean. Residents receive heavily discounted charters on upscale boats that have premier finishes and are stocked with top shelf spirits and wine. Mr. Wolitzer, 25, who works for a sports agency, was sold.

“The access to high-end yachts swayed my decision to buy at The Continuum and is an incentive that I take full advantage of,” Mr. Wolitzer said. “It’s huge, especially in my business when I am dealing with high-profile sports players, to be able to give them access to these incredible boats where they experience great service. I know that they’ll be well taken care of.”

Freebies and perks for homeowners such as a private club membership are a mainstay in the world of luxury real estate and intended to entice prospective buyers to sign on the dotted line.

According to Jonathan Miller, the president and chief executive of the real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel, they’re primarily a domestic phenomenon.

In the U.S. residential real estate market, gifts are offered by both developers who want to move apartments in their swanky buildings and individuals selling their homes. They range from modest to over-the-top, Mr. Miller said, and are more prevalent when the market is soft.

“When sales lag, freebies increase in a bid to incentivize buyers,” he said. “These days, sales are slowing, and inventory is rising after two years of being the opposite, which suggests that we may see more of them going forward.”

Many of these extras are especially present in South Florida, Mr. Miller said, where the market is normalizing after the unprecedented boom it saw during the pandemic. “The frenzy in South Florida was intense compared with the rest of the country because it became a place where people wanted to live full time,” he said. “Now that the numbers are inching toward pre-pandemic levels, freebies could push wavering buyers over the finish line.”

Kelly Killoren Bensimon, a real estate salesperson for Douglas Elliman in Miami and New York, said that the gifts that she has encountered in her business include everything from yacht access and use of a summer house to magnums of pricey wine. “One person I know of who was selling a US$5 million house in the Hamptons even threw in a free Mercedes 280SL,” she said. “They didn’t want to lower the price but were happy to sweeten the deal.”

A car, an Aston Martin to be exact, is also a lure at Aston Martin Residences in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Buyers who bought one of the building’s 01 line apartments—a collection of 47 ocean-facing residences ranging in size from 325 to 362sqm and US$8.3 million to US$9 million in price—had their choice of the DBX Miami Riverwalk Special Edition or the DB11 Miami Riverwalk Special Edition. The DBX is Aston Martin’s first SUV and retails for around US$200,000. It may have helped propel sales given that all the apartments are sold out.

The US$59 million triplex penthouse, meanwhile, is still up for grabs, and the buyer will receive a US$3.2 million Aston Martin Vulcan track-only sports car, one of only 24 ever made.

“We want to give homeowners the chance to live the full Aston Martin lifestyle, and owning a beautiful Aston Martin is definitely a highlight of that,” said Alejandro Aljanti, the chief marketing officer for G&G Business Developments, the building’s developer. “We wanted to include the cars as part of the package for our more exclusive units.”

The US$800,000 furniture budget for buyers of the North Tower condominiums at The Estates at Acqualina in Sunny Isles, Florida, is another recent head-turning perk. The 94 residences sold out last year, according to president of sales Michael Goldstein, and had a starting price of US$6.3 million. “You can pick the furniture ahead of time, and when buyers move in later this year, all they’ll need is a toothbrush,” he said.

Then there’s the US$2 million art collection that was included in the sale of the penthouse residence at the Four Seasons Residences in Miami’s Brickell neighbourhood. The property recently sold for $15.9 million and spans 817sqm feet. Designed by the renowned firm ODP Architects, it features contemporary paintings and sculpture pieces from notable names such as the American conceptual artist Bill Beckley and the sculptor Tom Brewitz.

But it’s hard to top the millions of dollars of extras that were attached to the asking price in 2019 of the US$85 million 1393sqm duplex at the Atelier, in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood. The list included two Rolls-Royce Phantoms, a Lamborghini Aventador, a US$1 million yacht with five years of docking fees, a summer stay at a Hamptons mansion, weekly dinners for two at lavish French restaurant Daniel and a live-in butler and private chef for a year. And the most outrageous of all: a flight for two to space.

It turned out that the so-called duplex was actually a collection of several apartments and a listing that went unsold. It did, however, generate plenty of buzz among the press and in real estate circles and was a marketing success, according to Mr. Miller.

“A listing like this that almost seems unbelievable with all the gifts will get plenty of eyeballs but is unlikely to push sales,” he said. “Empirically, it’s not an effective tactic.”

On the other hand, Mr. Miller said that more reasonable but still generous freebies, such as the membership to a yacht club, have the potential to push undecided buyers to go for the sale. “A nice but not too lavish gift won’t be the singular thing toward their decision but can be a big factor,” he said. “It’s a feel-good incentive that buyers think they’re getting without an extra cost.”

Examples of these bonuses include a membership to the 1 Hotel South Beach private beach club that buyers receive with the purchase of a residence at Baccarat Residences Brickell, or the one-year membership to the Grand Bay Beach Club in Key Biscayne for those who spring for a home at Casa Bella Residences by B&B Italia, located in downtown Miami and a residential project from the namesake renowned Italian furniture brand. The price of a membership at the Grand Bay Beach Club is usually a US$19,500 initiation fee and US$415 in monthly dues.

Still enticing but less expensive perks include the two-hour cruise around New York on a wooden Hemmingway boat, valued at US$1,900, for buyers at Quay Tower, at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City. The building’s developer, Robert Levine, said that he started offering the boat trip in July to help sell the remaining units. “We’re close to 70% sold, but, of course, I want everything to go,” he said.

There’s also the US$1,635 Avalon throw blanket from Hermes for those who close on a unit at Ten30 South Beach, a 33-unit boutique condominium; in Manhattan’s Financial District, a custom piece of art from the acclaimed artist James Perkins is gifted to buyers at Jolie, a 42-story building on Greenwich Street. Perkins said the value of the piece depends on the home purchase price, but the minimum is US$4,000. “The higher end homes get a more sizable work,” he said.

When gifts are part of a total real estate package, the sale can become emotional and personal, according to Chad Carroll, a real estate agent with Compass in South Florida and the founder of The Carroll Group. “If the freebie appeals to the buyer, the transaction takes on a different dynamic,” he said. “A gift becomes the kicker that they love the idea of having.”

Speaking from his own experience, Mr. Carroll said that sellers can also have an emotional connection to the exchange. “I was selling my house in Golden Isles last year for US$5.4 million and included my jet ski and paddle boards,” he said. “The buyers were a family with young kids and absolutely loved the water toys.” Mr. Carroll could have held out for a higher bidder, he said, but decided to accept their offer. “I liked them and wanted them to create the same happy memories in the home that I did,” he said.

The family moved in a few months later.

August 24, 2022

TIME TO UPGRADE YOUR OLD PHONE? MORE CONSUMERS SAY, ‘NOT YET’

Global smartphone shipments fell nearly 9% in the second quarter, as inflation worries outweigh the urge to get the latest phone

The global smartphone market is taking a breather.

With inflation lifting the cost of daily necessities like gasoline and food, many phone owners are sticking with their current models longer, according to industry executives. Companies are making fewer phones and fewer phone parts, and they are planning for a further rough patch ahead.

China’s Xiaomi Corp., the world’s third-largest smartphone maker after Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., said Friday that it shipped 26% fewer smartphones in the April-to-June quarter compared with a year earlier, and smartphone-related revenue fell 28% to the equivalent of $6.2 billion.

Xiaomi cited shrinking consumer demand in China, which had pandemic-related lockdowns in the quarter, as well as rising food and fuel prices around the globe.

In the same quarter, worldwide smartphone shipments declined nearly 9% compared with a year earlier to 286 million units, according to research firm International Data Corp. The biggest drag on the market was China, but the U.S. and most other regions were also weaker, IDC said.

Sean Mullee, a 23-year-old economist in Washington, D.C., recently moved to the capital from Ohio and said he found the cost of living high, especially now with inflation running at more than 8%. Mr. Mullee, who has an iPhone X he got a couple of years ago, said he wasn’t planning to upgrade for now.

“When your car breaks down, it’s like, ‘OK, well I need a car, so I have to go get one.’ But until then, I’m going to keep putting it off,” he said.

The situation has changed from the first two years of the pandemic, when people staying at home were using their phones more. In that period, demand was strong and the biggest problem for the industry was the supply chain, which was hit by shipping delays, Covid-19 lockdowns and a shortage of semiconductors. Those issues haven’t gone away but are gradually easing.

“What started out as a supply-constrained industry earlier this year has turned into a demand-constrained market,” said Nabila Popal, an analyst with IDC.

The slowdown isn’t uniform. Sales of smartphones priced above $900 grew more than 20% in the first half of this year compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. The segment includes Samsung’s foldable smartphones and many of Apple’s latest iPhones.

Only about one in 10 smartphones globally fell into that premium category in the first half of the year, but it accounted for 70% of industry profits, Counterpoint said. Canalys Research analyst Runar Bjørhovde said wealthy consumers aren’t as bothered by the higher cost of daily expenses and still want to have the latest phones in their pockets.

On the flip side, some big carriers are seeing more subscribers default on their payments as inflation takes a bite out of household finances. “Naturally they’re not going to see people buying new phones if they can’t even pay for their phone subscriptions,” said Mr. Bjørhovde.

Samsung introduced budget 5G models in March, a move it said was aimed at stimulating demand, while it is also pitching foldable phones that cost as much as $1,800 in the premium market.

Apple, which is expected to roll out the latest versions of its iPhone in September, benefits from being primarily a high-end brand, but there are signs that it can’t rest easy.

The biggest iPhone assembler, Foxconn Technology Group, said this month that it saw slowing demand for smartphones, as did Qualcomm Inc., a chip supplier to Apple and others, in July.

Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a leader in advanced smartphone chips, said recently that its smartphone business is no longer its biggest revenue generator. The No. 1 spot is now held by high-performance computing chips that are used in applications such as graphics processing and autonomous driving.

China, which accounts for nearly a quarter of global smartphone shipments, is at the centre of concerns about global demand.

From July 29 to Aug. 1, Apple took the unusual step of discounting its iPhones in China and running ads online advertising the sale. It knocked the equivalent of nearly $100 off the price of its iPhone 13 Pro Max and 13 Pro models.

Wang Xiang, the president of Xiaomi, alluded to a similar situation on Friday when reporting the company’s weak results, including a 67% drop in net profit. “Due to the weak market demand, we are trying various ways to clear our inventory, which has caused a decline in profit,” he said.

Zhao Haijun, co-chief executive officer of Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., said he saw some companies involved in making smartphones or smartphone parts suddenly cutting orders.

“That triggered a panic in the supply chain,” Mr. Zhao said on an investor call this month.

Feng Xiao, a 37-year-old sports-event organiser based in Shanghai, echoed Mr. Mullee in the U.S. when asked whether she was planning to upgrade her phone. “My iPhone 12, which I’ve used for about two years, is still just fine,” she said.

Analysts said they thought demand would likely start to improve later this year or next year and the people who say they are happy with their phones would eventually get restless. That assumes there won’t be major global disruptions such as a deepening of the U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan or a new surge in inflation.

“We continue to believe that any reduction today is not demand that is lost, but simply pushed forward,” said IDC’s Ms. Popal.

—Jiyoung Sohn contributed to this article.

August 24, 2022August 24, 2022

THE 30-YEAR-OLD SPENDING US$1 BILLION TO SAVE CRYPTO

Crypto is ailing. Sam Bankman-Fried is betting a billion dollars he can fix it.

The chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading Ltd. has appointed himself the industry’s saviour—and crypto investors are closely watching his moves after months of market carnage. This year, he bailed out a troubled digital-currency lender and tried to stabilize another. He acquired crypto exchanges in Canada and Japan. He appeared in magazine ads opposite supermodel Gisele Bündchen in a bid to keep mainstream investors enthusiastic about crypto despite the downturn.

That kind of speed is routine for Mr. Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old billionaire with a mop of curly hair who sleeps a few hours a night and toys with a fidget spinner during interviews. Last year, when regulatory scrutiny of crypto led Mr. Bankman-Fried to move FTX’s headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, dozens of employees relocated to the island nation within about a month.

Mr. Bankman-Fried says his ultimate goal is to bring crypto to the masses. He wants to make FTX a household name and use the technology behind bitcoin to reinvent traditional finance, including the stock market and ordinary consumer payments.

He has a lot of work to do. More than a decade after bitcoin’s birth, proponents still struggle to explain the value of digital currencies to a broad audience. Bitcoin has fallen nearly 70% from its November peak and the crash has erased $2 trillion of value from the crypto market, hurting millions of investors.

Not all of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s moves have paid off. An investment in Japan has proved rocky for FTX. And the trading firm he owns alongside FTX, Alameda Research, took losses when it tried to prop up troubled crypto lender Voyager Digital Ltd. Alameda lent Voyager $75 million and increased its stake in the company to 9.5%—only for Voyager to file for bankruptcy less than two weeks later.

“We want to do what we can to stem contagion, and sometimes that’s going to mean that we try to help out in cases where it’s not enough,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said. “If that never happened, I’d feel that we were being way too conservative.”

Like other crypto exchanges, FTX’s core business is to facilitate the buying and selling of digital currencies, and it takes a small cut of transactions. The firm has grown into a juggernaut since it was founded three years ago. With only about 300 employees, FTX is the world’s third-biggest crypto exchange by volume, doing US$9.4 billion worth of trades on an average day, according to data provider CoinGecko.

The firm made net income of US$388 million on $1.02 billion of revenue last year, according to a person familiar with the matter. It has stayed profitable in 2022 even as crypto prices slumped, Mr. Bankman-Fried said. FTX was valued at US$32 billion during its last funding round in January.

Now, with bitcoin hovering around $21,000—roughly in line with its level in late 2020, before last year’s big bull market—Mr. Bankman-Fried says the worst is over.

“Anything could happen, obviously, but as far as I know, we’ve seen most of the contagion already flushed out of the system,” he said.

Expanding an empire

The plea for help from the CEO of BlockFi Inc., a digital-currency lender, came on a Saturday evening in June. Mr. Bankman-Fried saw the message around 11 p.m. after playing padel, a tennis-like sport, with colleagues. He jumped into his Toyota Corolla with fellow FTX executive Ramnik Arora, turned on the air conditioning and returned the call.

BlockFi was essentially a crypto bank, taking deposits and lending them to borrowers that use the funds for trading purposes. In return, depositors earned interest on their digital money—usually at much higher rates than traditional banks offered on dollar deposits. BlockFi and other crypto lenders did brisk business until May, when the swift collapse of two cryptocurrencies called TerraUSD and Luna sent shock waves through the market and blew up hedge fund Three Arrows Capital Ltd., one of the biggest borrowers in crypto.

Fears of a 2008-style financial contagion spread. On June 12, a popular crypto lender called Celsius Network LLC suspended withdrawals. Other lenders, including BlockFi and Voyager, were threatened with the crypto equivalent of a run on the bank.

The crash set off rounds of calls into FTX’s headquarters in the Bahamas. Around 15 crypto firms sought money from FTX during a two-week stretch in June, including “miners” who run computer algorithms to generate bitcoin, as well as Celsius itself, Mr. Arora recalled.

Celsius, which has since filed for bankruptcy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

FTX concluded that Celsius was beyond saving, FTX executives said, but that BlockFi was healthier. Following a Sunday morning Zoom meeting with BlockFi’s leadership on June 19, the day after the initial call from his car, Mr. Bankman-Fried decided to push for a deal.

By throwing BlockFi a lifeline, Mr. Bankman-Fried also seized the opportunity to expand his empire.

In the final deal unveiled on July 1, FTX agreed to loan BlockFi $400 million with an option to buy the firm for up to US$240 million. That price is a steal compared with the $4.75 billion valuation that BlockFi reached in July 2021, according to PitchBook data.

“It’s certainly not the outcome that we were expecting last summer,” BlockFi CEO Zac Prince said, but he called the FTX deal a win for the company and its clients. Unlike other offers BlockFi received, which could have forced BlockFi’s retail customers to lose part of their deposits, the FTX transaction was designed to keep depositors whole.

BlockFi says it has more than 650,000 funded accounts. If FTX ends up buying BlockFi, it will expand into the lending market, adding the crypto version of a big bank to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s portfolio.

Mr. Bankman-Fried says he wants to turn FTX into a sort of financial supermarket, offering everything from lending to stock trading to payments.

“The idea generating this is, ‘What do you actually want to do with your money, as the typical consumer? What are the things that are actually valuable for your day-to-day life?’” he said.

Mr. Bankman-Fried is a longtime vegan. He majored in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for quantitative-trading giant Jane Street Capital for three years before diving into crypto. He is the son of two professors at Stanford Law School.

Bloomberg recently estimated his net worth at $11.9 billion, down from nearly $26 billion last year before the crypto crash. He is an adherent of effective altruism, a philosophical movement that says individuals should maximize their positive impact on society by making substantial money and giving it away. His favoured causes include pandemic prevention and preventing artificial intelligence from harming humanity.

People close to him express surprise at how naturally Mr. Bankman-Fried became a public figure. He has become a regular in Washington, testifying before Congress, promoting FTX’s agenda and lobbying for the crypto industry.

“He has had to transition from talking to a purely crypto audience to dealing with lawmakers, journalists and the public,” said Chris McCann, a partner at Race Capital, an early investor in FTX. “In 2019 he didn’t have a lot of those skill sets. He was much more of a shy, quirky, geeky person.”

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s first headquarters was a rented house in Berkeley, Calif., where he started Alameda Research in 2017—outfitted with desks and computers bought on Amazon. He later moved Alameda to Hong Kong, where crypto regulation was lighter than in the U.S.

Alameda sought to capture profits from the bitcoin market, where a mishmash of exchanges enabled arbitrage opportunities—the ability to buy a coin in one location and sell it elsewhere for more. One early strategy involved buying bitcoin in the U.S. and then selling it in Japan, where it commanded a premium.

He launched FTX in 2019, betting that his team could build a better exchange than the incumbents. Last year, amid mounting scrutiny of crypto by global regulators, Mr. Bankman-Fried decided to move FTX’s headquarters to the Bahamas, where the government had established a crypto-friendly regulatory regime.

Today FTX is based in an office park ringed by palm trees and dominated by a sun-baked parking lot. Mr. Bankman-Fried lives in a nearby luxury apartment complex. Although he has a reputation for living frugally—he has long lived with housemates and often sleeps on a beanbag at work—real-estate records show a unit of FTX paid $30 million for a five-bedroom penthouse there.

Mr. Bankman-Fried said he’s one of 10 FTX colleagues who share the apartment. “Obviously, it would be a ridiculous place for me to be living alone,” he said.

‘Salvage our business’

FTX expanded earlier this year by acquiring Japanese crypto exchange Liquid, which was hit by a $97 million hack in August 2021.

Shortly after the hack, Seth Melamed, then a Liquid executive, was getting on a plane to Tokyo. Liquid faced insolvency, customers were angry, and Mr. Melamed worried that Japanese police might arrest him at the airport. He wrote to Mr. Bankman-Fried on the Telegram messaging app.

His note read: “Fully understand this unusual, but if FTX would consider investing or acquiring Liquid it would salvage our business and benefit the crypto community more broadly.”

The plane had no Wi-Fi. When it landed, he was relieved to find no police waiting for him and a response from Mr. Bankman-Fried: “happy to take a look!”

A few days later, FTX agreed to loan Liquid $120 million, keeping it afloat and setting the stage for the takeover.

It wasn’t an entirely smooth acquisition. FTX ended up losing thousands of Japanese customers who were already using FTX and refused to move over to the local unit regulated by Japan’s Financial Services Agency, a person familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Melamed, now chief operating officer of FTX Japan, said, “We are confident we can return to previous levels of activity by Japanese users at FTX before the end of this year and surpass this by 2023.”

In June, FTX agreed to buy Canadian crypto exchange Bitvo Inc. FTX has also amassed licenses to provide financial services in Australia, Dubai and the European Union as part of an international push.

FTX’s ambitions extend to traditional markets. After buying a registered U.S. brokerage firm last year, it recently allowed American customers to trade stocks on its app alongside bitcoin. In May, Mr. Bankman-Fried spent $648 million of his personal fortune to buy a 7.6% stake in Robinhood Markets Inc., maker of the popular trading app. He revealed his purchase after Robinhood stock plunged nearly 80% from its initial public offering; the shares have edged slightly higher since then.

Mr. Bankman-Fried is the majority owner of both FTX and Alameda, an arrangement that has drawn criticism from crypto skeptics as well as some digital-currency traders. In traditional markets such as stocks and futures, exchanges are required to be neutral platforms that don’t benefit one trader over another. Regulators discourage them from being intertwined with trading firms, considering it a conflict of interest. No such restrictions exist in crypto.

Mr. Bankman-Fried said Alameda doesn’t get special privileges on FTX. While it was initially a major participant on FTX, helping to juice trading activity, it has since dropped to a small share of trading volumes, he said.

Last year Mr. Bankman-Fried resigned from his role as CEO of Alameda, saying he was spending most of his time on FTX. The firm continues to generate significant profits for him. One cryptocurrency wallet controlled by Alameda—where the firm holds some of its funds—has generated more than $550 million in trading profits since 2020, according to Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm.

FTX amassed a war chest of some $2 billion in a series of funding rounds in 2021 and early 2022, while crypto prices were still high. Investors in FTX included established asset managers such as Singapore state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd. and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The funding allowed FTX to make acquisitions after crypto crashed.

Mr. Bankman-Fried said that FTX has a few billion in cash that it could use for other deals—money it keeps in dollars, not crypto.