Landlords would rather hold out for higher-paying tenants than lower rent

For most Singaporeans, the mall is where life happens—groceries, dinner, a haircut, the kids’ enrichment class, all under one roof. It’s as much infrastructure as it is retail.

And we are not short of options. According to shopping mall directory SingMalls, there are at least 106 malls across the island—serving a total population of 6.11 million people. That works out to roughly one mall for every 58,000 people, in a country spanning just 700 square kilometres.

But in some once-bustling malls today, the silence is striking: empty shopfronts, boarded-up units, and “Coming Soon” signs left hanging for months.

Singapore’s retail vacancy rate has been rising—hitting 6.8% island-wide in Q1 2025, up from 6.2% the previous quarter, according to Savills Research. Some businesses have cited rising rental costs, yet higher vacancies alone do not seem to be forcing landlords to lower rents.

Aren’t landlords bleeding money by leaving units vacant? The uncomfortable answer, it turns out, is often no—and The Woodleigh Mall is the clearest illustration of why.

Vulcan Post examines what is going on behind the scenes.

An exodus of shops

The Woodleigh Mall soft-launched in May 2023 as the anchor of a brand new estate, meant to be the beating heart of the Bidadari community—the only full-fledged mall serving thousands of residents in the area. \

At its grand opening in Nov 2023, management proudly announced it had achieved 100% occupancy, calling it “a testament to our tenants’ trust in our vision.”

But less than two years later, the picture looks very different. 

Residents and workers at The Woodleigh Mall have watched an exodus unfold, particularly in the basement food cluster known as fEAsT@Woodleigh.

According to Mothership, more than 15 shops vacated the mall within the span of a year. Former tenants include Burger King, Fish & Co., Lee Wee Brothers, and Swee Heng Bakery—all gone.

A 45-year-old shop employee who has worked at the mall for about three years told the publication that the high turnover among F&B tenants has been happening “since the start.”

“Since the start, the mall is not doing very well. The footfall is low over here compared to other malls,” she said. “Normally for a new mall, the crowd will slowly build up, but not for this mall. It has been very stagnant,” she added.

Moreover, some residents have cited expensive parking, a confusing layout, and limited retail options as reasons they go elsewhere. “People don’t come here to shop because there’s nothing to shop,” the employee said.

Many fingers have pointed to another key culprit: rent. 

Constance Tan, director of bubble tea brand No.17 Tea, told Stomp that when her lease came up for renewal, the landlord quoted a 30% increase in rent, a figure she described as “totally unsustainable.” Rather than leave entirely, No.17 Tea downsized to a smaller kiosk-format unit within the same mall.

Residents’ instinct is to blame greedy landlords, and that isn’t entirely wrong. But it misses how commercial property actually works—and why holding out for for higher-paying tenants can make perfect financial sense.

A mall is valued like a stock, rather than a business

The footfall problem and the rent problem feed into each other in a vicious cycle.

Mall rents are largely determined by foot traffic. A mall pulling in five million visitors a month, for example, can command far higher rents than one drawing 1.5 million. But when footfall disappoints, tenants struggle to generate the sales needed to justify their rent. Some eventually leave, making the mall even less attractive to shoppers—and even harder to lease out.

So why not simply lower rents to fill empty units?

Because for commercial landlords, lower rents do not just mean lower income. They can also reduce the mall’s overall value.

Unlike an HDB flat, which is valued mainly based on nearby transaction prices, commercial properties are typically valued based on the rental income they generate. According to CKS Property Consultants, this is calculated by taking a property’s net operating income—rental revenue minus operating expenses—and dividing it by a market capitalisation rate. In simple terms: the more rent a mall collects, the more valuable it is.

That creates a dilemma for landlords. If they cut rents across the board to attract tenants, the mall’s projected income falls, and so does its valuation.

This matters because banks lend against that valuation. In Singapore, commercial property loans are typically capped at around 75% of a property’s value. So if a mall’s valuation drops by S$50 million after rental cuts, the landlord’s borrowing capacity could shrink by S$37.5 million. That’s real money off the table.

Think about it from the landlord’s perspective.

An empty unit could cost them a few thousand dollars a month in lost rent. Dropping rents across the board to fill the mall could slash its valuation by millions overnight. Holding out isn’t stubbornness, but math.

Who are the higher-paying tenants?

Ironically, the tenants most willing to pay high rents are often tuition centres, clinics, and enrichment studios—businesses with steady income streams that generate little to no shopping footfall.

These tenants are attractive to landlords precisely because they are less dependent on walk-in traffic. A quiet Tuesday afternoon may hurt a restaurant or fashion retailer, but a tuition centre still collects its fees. They pay reliably, sign longer leases, and offer stable income streams, making them ideal tenants on paper, even if they gradually hollow out the mall’s retail atmosphere.

Healthcare and enrichment tenants have been part of The Woodleigh Mall’s mix since its soft launch—sitting alongside the F&B brands that were publicly celebrated. As those F&B tenants have left, the balance has shifted, and the education and medical presence has become increasingly prominent. One in four units at The Woodleigh Mall is now an enrichment centre or medical clinic.

On paper, occupancy still looks healthy because these units count as filled space. But to residents hoping to grab dinner, shop, or run errands, the mall can feel less like a vibrant retail hub and more like a ghost town, one where “everything is so expensive.”

On the other end of the spectrum, landlords are also holding out for deep-pocketed foreign brands, particularly the wave of Chinese F&B chains currently expanding aggressively into Singapore.

As of Aug 2025, some 85 Chinese F&B brands were operating around 405 outlets in Singapore, more than double the 32 brands recorded just a year earlier. Many of these brands have reportedly offered higher rental bids to secure prime retail spots—precisely the kind of tenant a landlord waiting for a premium offer is hoping to attract.

As unfair as it sounds, there’s no mechanism in Singapore that forces landlords to fill units with retail tenants, or to fill them at all.

There is no vacancy tax on commercial retail space, nor any penalty for keeping units empty for extended periods while waiting for a better tenant. There is also no requirement that a mall serving a residential estate must maintain a minimum standard of retail or F&B options.

The Woodleigh Mall’s joint venture owners—Cuscaden Peak Investments and Kajima Development—even put the mall up for sale for an asking price of S$800 million in July 2024, less than a year after its grand opening. That’s likely not the behaviour of owners optimising for the community, but for exit.

What does this mean for residents?

The frustration residents feel at Woodleigh is real and legitimate. When you’re one of thousands of HDB residents with a single mall serving your estate, it matters what’s in it.

But the problem isn’t simply that landlords are greedy. It’s the entire valuation and financing system for commercial property that creates rational incentives to prioritise rent income over community function. A landlord who drops rent to fill their mall with popular F&B tenants may literally be destroying value on paper by doing so.

Until there’s a policy lever that changes those incentives, whether that’s a vacancy tax, use requirements for community-serving malls, or something else entirely, the cycle is likely to continue.

So the next time you walk past a shuttered unit in your neighbourhood mall, remember: it might not be sitting empty because nobody wants it. It might be sitting empty because the landlord is waiting for a tenant who makes better financial sense.

And right now, nothing is stopping them.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: The Woodleigh Mall, ConsiderationNo1619 via Reddit

from the billionaire-pseudo-journalism dept

What’s left of CBS News recently landed an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a bit of a doozy (transcript, video). There’s a part where Netanyahu tries to blame foreign social media bot farms for the rise in people disgusted by his government’s carpet bombing of children. There’s a part where he pretends to not actually want billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

And there’s this part where he likens himself to Churchill and makes some strange comments about Hitler:

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: They implant themselves among civilians, you know, so that they have civilian casualties and they can put it on the tube or in your cell phone. So, yes, I mean, I don’t know how to fight it. I mean, Churchill, without cell phones and without digital campaigns and farm bots was labeled a warmonger in the 1930s because he said, “You have to stand up to Hitler.”

MAJOR GARRETT: Hitler, right.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: And they accused him of being a warmonger. And Hitler didn’t even say “death to America, death to Britain,” you know. I– I think he might have planned it, but he didn’t say it. And still they accused him of that.

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The interviewer, Major Garrett, spends absolutely no serious time pushing back against the claims Netanyahu makes. Or meaningfully addressing indisputable evidence that the Israeli government has engaged in widespread genocidal war crimes on the U.S. taxpayer dime. When Netanyahu tries to dismiss the massive civilian casualties in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon as minor and innocent mistakes, Garrett has no response.

Garrett doesn’t normally work for 60 Minutes. He was brought on board from elsewhere within CBS because Netanyahu specifically asked for him. According to Oliver Darcy’s excellent media newsletter Status, 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl was trying to land the interview with Netanyahu when Weiss intervened and shuffled the interview over to Garrett, causing (more) internal anger:

“But behind the scenes, Status has learned that famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl had also been gunning for the interview but was upstaged by CBS News boss Bari Weiss, who booked Netanyahu herself and handed the interview to Garrett, who is notably not a “60 Minutes” correspondent. The move sparked hostility and amplified the already strained relationship between Weissand the reporting team at the iconic newsmagazine.”

Not so iconic anymore.

The New York Post (for what it’s worth) also indicates that Netanyahu got to select his interviewer as a condition of CBS landing the interview. Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison specifically for this sort of softball treatment of global autocrats, and had already been under fire for censoring stories that displeased the Trump administration.

There’s been a mass exodus at CBS for months as actual journalists bristle at the obvious shift toward soggy corporatist agitprop under Weiss. While Weiss was hired on to modernize CBS and make autocratic billionaire ass kissing exciting, viral, and good for ratings; the whole experiment has been a monumental failure so far, with CBS News recently seeing its lowest ratings in a quarter century.

Weiss rose to prominence at her weird little troll blog Free Press, which obviously hasn’t translated well to running a television network. Case in point: Weiss’ preferred new CBS News anchor, Tony Dokoupil, is having to broadcast the network’s coverage on Trump’s China visit from Taiwan because Weiss and friends failed to secure his visa on time for the trip. This mirrors other similar competency issues like Weiss making last-minute unapproved changes to teleprompter text that screws up broadcasts.

Beyond the clownish nature of it all, it remains an open question who this sort of stuff is actually for (beyond the extremely rich people endlessly trying to control information flow). Despite having a massive fortune, Ellison seems incapable of creating propaganda people actually want to watch, and even their target audience — center-right bigots with impaired critical thinking faculties — aren’t tuning in because they have a universe of other terrible (but far more entertaining) choices.

Like Jeff Bezos’ sad and desperate effort to repurpose the Washington Post into what now feels like a satirical billionaire-coddling rag, all the money in the world can’t seem to produce class warfare agitprop actual human beings want to consume. Almost as if the behaviors of the global authoritarian extraction class are starting to reach a point where they’re simply too heinous and ham-handed to spin.

Filed Under: bari weiss, benjamin netanyahu, gaza, journalism, larry ellison, major garrett, media, propaganda, softball interviews, war crimes

Companies: cbs, cbs news, paramount

Microsoft is introducing a new capability that will allow it to remotely roll back problematic Windows drivers delivered through Windows Update.

Called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, the new feature will remove the need for hardware partners or end users to manually fix driver issues once drivers have been distributed to devices. The recovery process is entirely managed by Microsoft, with no partner-side actions required, and will only be initiated for Windows drivers rejected due to quality issues during shiproom evaluation.

Under the current system, if a driver distributed through Windows Update has quality issues, the hardware partner must submit a replacement, or users must manually uninstall the faulty driver, which can leave devices using subpar drivers for a long time.

With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft can directly trigger a rollback to a previous, stable driver version (or the next best version available on Windows Update) without requiring new software or actions from hardware partners.

“Today, when a driver published through Windows Update is identified after distribution to have quality issues, the remediation path relies on the hardware partner to submit an updated driver — or on end users to manually uninstall the problematic driver themselves. This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period,” Microsoft said.

“With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft can now trigger a recovery action directly from the Hardware Dev Center (HDC) Driver Shiproom, rolling back a problematic driver to the previously known-good version via the Windows Update pipeline. This is handled through coordinated updates to the PnP driver stack and the driver flighting and publishing services.”

The company also noted that:

• Devices where a Driver Shiproom-approved driver cannot be located will not attempt Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery
• Recovery is delivered through the existing Windows Update infrastructure — no new client agent or partner tooling is required.

The new Windows Update feature is being tested between May and August and will begin rolling back drivers rejected during Flighting or Gradual Rollout starting September 2026.

Last week, at WinHEC 2026 (the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) in Taipei, Microsoft unveiled a Driver Quality Initiative (DQI) to raise driver quality, reliability, and security across the Windows ecosystem, in coordination with OEM, silicon, and hardware partners.

“In the months ahead, we will keep investing in the fundamentals that matter most to customers: reliability, security, performance, compatibility and quality,” Microsoft said. “We’ll also keep collaborating with OEMs, silicon partners, IHVs, ODMs and the broader hardware ecosystem through the Windows Resiliency Initiative, the new Driver Quality Initiative and the work we do together every day.”

In June 2025, Microsoft also announced plans to periodically remove legacy drivers from the Windows Update catalog to mitigate compatibility issues and security risks.

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The round, led by Schroders Capital, follows January’s acquisition of Berlin-based StackFuel and 50% year-on-year revenue growth. Customers include the AA, Babcock, and Capital.

Multiverse, the London-based AI- and tech-upskilling platform founded by Euan Blair, said on Friday it had raised $70m in primary funding led by Schroders Capital, at a $2.1bn valuation.

Existing investors, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, Index Ventures, Bond and StepStone Group, joined the round.

The new valuation marks a $400m step up from the company’s $1.7bn Series D in 2022. Multiverse said revenue grew 50% year-on-year for the third consecutive year of accelerating growth, and the company reported its first cash-positive quarter, from January to March 2026. All employees are being offered equity in connection with the raise.

Multiverse is positioning the new round behind a category pitch rather than a product one. Chief executive Euan Blair told the company’s blog the firm wants to become ‘Europe’s AI adoption platform’, sitting between the businesses buying AI tools and the workforces meant to use them.

In his framing, the missing layer of the AI stack is not another model or another agent runtime; it is the workforce capable of operating them.

The European push has a foothold already. In January Multiverse completed the acquisition of StackFuel, a Berlin-based data and AI training provider with corporate customers including Mercedes-Benz, IAV and Telefónica, and a stated goal of training 100,000 German workers in AI skills.

StackFuel reports a 92% programme completion rate. Its founders, Leo Marose and Stefan Berntheisel, joined the senior leadership of the combined entity.

On the company’s own numbers, Multiverse has delivered more than £2bn in verified ROI for over 1,000 employers to date, including Babcock, the AA, Capita and Addison Lee.

Atlas, its AI coaching platform, tripled daily active users in the past year. Partnerships have moved upmarket on the tools side, with Microsoft, Palantir and Databricks now named as platform partners.

Multiverse is leaning into a familiar enterprise complaint: AI budgets are up, AI returns are uneven. The company cites BCG’s 2026 AI Radar, which reports corporate AI spend has doubled since last year, and notes that ‘trailblazer’ adopters invest about twice as much in workforce upskilling as ‘follower’ peers.

CEOs surveyed by Multiverse named skills gaps as the second-largest barrier to AI adoption, behind only regulation and ahead of data quality.

The raise comes with a political signal, of the sort British scale-ups now actively seek. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said in a statement provided by the company that the UK government wants Britain to achieve the fastest rate of AI adoption in the G7, and called Multiverse ‘a fantastic example of a British company helping turn that ambition into reality’. The investment, Reeves added, would ‘support its expansion across Europe’.

Multiverse’s thesis cuts across a louder one in the enterprise AI conversation. Where companies including Klarna have frozen hiring on the argument that AI tools let them do more with fewer people, Multiverse is selling employers on the opposite trade: that the value of an AI deployment is determined by how well the existing workforce can operate it.

The new round is, in effect, a $70m bet that the latter view is the one enterprise buyers will be writing cheques against next.

Multiverse did not name the banks involved or disclose run-rate revenue. The company said the funding would be used to accelerate European expansion, with no further geographic breakdown.

Few pieces of technology capture attention quite like a device that launched an era. In September 2008 T-Mobile teamed up with Google to reveal the G1, a phone built from the ground up to run Android software. Available starting that October for customers on a two-year plan, it arrived at stores priced at $179 ($277 today) and immediately drew crowds eager to try something different.

When users opened the body, they discovered a full QWERTY keyboard stashed away beneath, which was a lifesaver for hammering out emails or scribbling down quick notes without having to look for those tiny on-screen buttons. The 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen sat above the keyboard, displaying some wonderful 320 x 480 pixel pictures and menus that would come to life with a tap or sweep of the finger.

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A little trackball tucked itself away just below the screen, making it easy to scroll through large lists or zoom into maps, which was difficult to perform on the glass without it. Nearby buttons handled the typical navigation, while a dedicated search key quickly returned Google results. Power came from a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor running at 528MHz and supported by 192MB of memory. In the box, they’d discover a 1GB microSD card already installed and ready to start, with room to add an 8GB one if necessary.

The 3.15MP rear camera took clear and detailed shots, and the autofocus quickly locked onto whatever you were trying to photograph. Despite the lack of a flash, daily photographs typically looked far better than you’d expect for a phone of this period. The detachable 1150 milliamp-hour battery pack provided around five hours of conversation time and more than five days on standby. It only took a few seconds to swap it out for a spare, and you were back up and running without having to find a charger.

The G1 launched with new software, the first version of Android, and did an excellent job of connecting with Google services from the start. Your Gmail would send new messages instantly, and Maps would show streets in sharp clarity and even spin to mirror the real world using a built-in compass. YouTube videos would play smoothly over Wi-Fi or a carrier data connection, and the new Android Market allowed you to download additional apps directly to your smartphone.

Connectivity-wise, the phone had all the bases covered, as it functioned on GSM networks, could do 3G speeds when available, easily snagged Wi-Fi networks, quickly paired with Bluetooth headsets, and provided accurate turn-by-turn directions via GPS. It weighed 158 grams and was just over half an inch thick, so it fit comfortably inside a pocket even with the sliding mechanism. You might choose between black, white, or brown to match your unique taste.

Pershing Square has taken a new position in Microsoft, with the size to be disclosed in a 13F filing later on Friday. The stock is down roughly 16% year-to-date.

Bill Ackman has bought Microsoft. Pershing Square’s chief executive said on X on Friday morning that the fund had taken a new position in the software company after its recent share-price decline, with the size to be disclosed in a regulatory filing later in the day. 

Ackman’s stated rationale was that the market is mispricing the enterprise franchise rather than the AI one. Investors have underestimated Microsoft’s software ‘given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price-value proposition’, he wrote, framing the position as a quality-compounder bet on the installed base rather than a directional call on Azure capex.

The timing is the substance of the trade. Microsoft shares are down roughly 16% year-to-date and have traded near $413 since late April, when chief financial officer Amy Hood used the company’s fiscal Q3 results to raise full-year capital expenditure guidance to about $190bn, well above the roughly $155bn analysts had penciled in.

The results themselves were a beat. Azure grew 40%, the AI run-rate hit $37bn, and total revenue cleared $82.9bn. The stock fell anyway, on what one widely circulated buy-side note called the $190bn capex plan that repriced AI.

Ackman has run this play before this year. Pershing Square disclosed a new stake in Meta in February, three weeks after the latter’s own capex-driven sell-off, with Ackman describing the position at the time as a ‘deeply discounted valuation’.

The Microsoft entry follows the same shape: a megacap dragged lower by an AI-spending guide, framed by Ackman as an opportunity to buy a high-quality franchise at a temporarily de-rated multiple.

Funds running more than $100m are required to file Form 13F disclosures of US-listed positions within 45 days of quarter-end, which makes Friday a heavy day for hedge-fund reading.

Pershing Square’s last 13F, covering the December quarter, showed eleven positions and roughly $16bn in disclosed US holdings concentrated in Brookfield, Uber, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta. Microsoft did not appear. Today’s filing will show whether the firm has trimmed any existing names to fund the new one or sized it from cash.

The trade also lands inside a wider AI-infrastructure debate. Hyperscalers have committed more than $650bn to AI capex across 2026, on the combined Q1 numbers from Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Apple, and the market is now pricing the question of when, or whether, that spend converts cleanly into operating earnings.

Ackman is, in effect, arguing that Microsoft’s existing Office, Windows and Azure book of business is enough to clear the bar, separately from the AI optionality.

Microsoft’s deep integration of OpenAI’s models across Copilot, Azure and the developer stack has been the dominant narrative in the company’s repricing over the past three years (TNW has tracked the arc). The capex bill is the cost of holding that lead. Ackman’s bet is that the enterprise software business underneath it is being given less credit than it should.

Pershing Square has not disclosed the size of the position or the average purchase price. The 13F filing is expected later on Friday US time.