The next speaker was Associate Professor Lum Sau Kim who is the Director of Graduate Programmes in the Department of Real Estate in NUS. She spoke about what I would call the love affair Singaporeans have with real estate. Housing takes a big chunk of our CPF money. It is the dominant use of our CPF money, she said. Many would completely exhaust their CPF money for housing. Many people actually leverage as much as possible and buy the biggest homes possible. Prof Lum said that, in effect, many are using housing as their pension funds and this is, in part, due to the lack of alternative investment vehicles. AK feels that this phenomenon can also be described as an overconsumption in housing and regular readers will remember that this is something I blog about often. People mistakenly think that their homes are investments when they are in reality......