When car dealer Keith Oh from Singapore first read the message on Facebook, he was not sure if it was real. A Chinese customer ordered a 1.1 million Singapore dollar (about 680.63 thousand euros) Bentley via a social network.

"He just asked the price and when we could deliver," he said. "It's the equivalent of a million dollars to us, but it's probably nothing to him."

The brisk sell-off was yet another sign of a broader trend: money is flowing through Singapore like never before. As the coronavirus pandemic hits Southeast Asia and political turmoil threatens Hong Kong, the city-state has become a safe haven for some of the region's wealthiest tycoons and their families.

For the wealthy "who can decide where they want to live and settle, Singapore is the place right now," said Stephan Repkow, who founded Wealth Management Alliance in 2015 after four years at Union Bancaire Privee. Repkow said two of his foreign clients have become residents in the past 12 months and more are on the way.

Singapore has long attracted wealthy Chinese, Indonesians and Malays who made short trips to shop, gamble in the casinos or get medical 'check-ups' at world-class clinics. Mount Elizabeth Hospital Orchard is just steps away from Gucci and Rolex stores.

The pandemic changed all that, leading many tycoons and their families to stay in the city-state for months, in some cases looking for residency to weather the storm. On a per capita basis, mortality rates in Malaysia and Indonesia are more than 10 to 30 times higher than in Singapore, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

The number of unique 'family offices' in the city-state has doubled since the end of 2019 to around 400, including companies recently set up by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Shu Ping, the billionaire behind the Chinese empire Haidilao International. Demand for private golf clubs is growing, real estate prices have risen the most since 2018, and, until the recent restrictions, Michelin-starred restaurants were full. Meanwhile, global banks like UBS are expanding in the city to manage the flow of assets.

The increase in coronavirus cases, which has prompted the government to adopt stricter border measures and cancel events such as the World Economic Forum meeting, may halt some of the migration of the wealthy to Singapore, but this is likely to be short-lived.

Although cases have increased to a few dozen per day, they are a far cry from the several hundred daily infections recorded in New York City alone. Singapore is also making strides in vaccination, with coverage of 30% of the population, almost double the rate in China and ahead of neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia.