In accordance with Singapore's well known goal of 17 million visitors by 2015, many new attractions are set to open soon such as the first Formula One Night Racing attraction, a high scale luxury resort and the world's largest observation wheel. However, it also appears as though Singapore has discovered a new market from which to attraction tourists – India. With an immediate short term goal of attracting one million visitors from India by 2009, Singapore has been marketing heavily to Indian residents, all of them potential tourists.
In 2007, approximately 749,000 visitors to Singapore came from India. That nation was the fourth largest tourists supply market for Singapore and grew by 14% over the previous year of 2006. At a more specific, city-level, Chennai ranked as the largest market in South India while it was the 2nd largest in all of India as a whole. Nearly ninety-thousand residents from Chennai visited Singapore which totalled a 17.05% year on year growth.
With the substantial number of current tourists coming from India and the future prospects of this market, Singapore has gone to great lengths to effective 'woo' the Indian tourism market. Furthermore, developers and property investors are also taking notice of this growing development.
With India tourism growing to a substantial percentage of Singapore's tourism market and inching closer to China’s market share, more tourists developments such as high-end retail and exhibition style properties or attractions are scheduled to come online in the new few years.
Many Indian nationals already own property in Singapore, and the demand may increase as more Indians visit the island nation on holiday and decide that they would like a permanent vacation home there. Few studies have been conducted regarding any effects on the real estate market at this point from such a demand. However, with Singapore having promoted several large scale road shows and exhibitions designed to woo more Indian tourists to coming to the island, it looks as though they just might meet their 17 million mark by the target year of 2015.