Temasek, Khazanah Put Marina Bay Office Tower on the Market for $4.8B in Singapore 

Singapore’s falling interest rates and rising office rents could be setting the stage for the city-state’s largest ever sale of a single property, with a joint venture between Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional and Temasek Holdings having put the Marina One complex on the market.

M+S Pte Ltd, which is 60 percent owned by the Malaysian sovereign fund with Temasek holding the remaining equity, has engaged JLL and Eastdil to market the office and retail complex in the Marina Bay area for up to S$6 billion ($4.8 billion), according to market sources who spoke with Mingtiandi.

The sale process is said to still be in the early stages, with industry analysts pointing to a shallow pool of potential buyers for an asset of this scale. News of the marketing effort was first reported by the Business Times, with M+S and JLL having not yet replied to inquiries from Mingtiandi by the time of publication. 

M+S is testing demand for the 2 million square foot (187,664 square metre) complex at 7 Straits View after investment in Singapore properties jumped nearly 27 percent last year to S$33.3 billion, according to figures from Cushman & Wakefield, with analysts pointing to the potential for rent increases this year which would boost investment yields. 

Next Door to MBFC

Marina One has hit the market just over a month after Hongkong Land sold a one-third interest in Tower 3 of the Marina Bay Financial Centre for S$1.45 billion, marking the largest sale of an office asset in the city-state since BlackRock sold Tower 2 in the Asia Square complex to a CapitaLand REIT for S$2.1 billion in 2017. 

BlackRock’s S$3.4 billion sale of Asia Square Tower 1 to the Qatar Investment Authority in 2016 still stands as Singapore’s largest-ever transaction of a single property.  

Located less than a block from the Marina Bay Financial Centre, M+S’s guide price for Marina One prices the 30-storey complex at S$2,970 per square foot, while Keppel REIT paid S$3,268 per square foot for its slice of the neighbouring property. 

Completed in 2018, Marina One has 84 years remaining on its 99-year leasehold, with 1.9 million square feet of the property dedicated to office use and the remaining 140,000 square feet for retail space. 

With rents estimated to be approximately 10 below those in the MBFC, Marina One is home to tech giants Meta, Netflix and Grab, as well as counting financial institutions such as Swiss private bank Julius Baer, Bank of New York Mellon and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group among its tenants. 

Designed by Germany’s Ingehoven Architects, and occupying a 282,000 square foot site, the complex has been certified as Platinum under both Singapore’s BCA Green Mark regimen and the US Green Building Council’s LEED system. The four-tower complex has two 30-storey office towers and a pair of 34-storey condo blocks which also house the four-storey retail podium, with the residential space not included in the marketing effort.

While priced slightly below the sum rate Keppel REIT paid for its piece of the MBFC last month, the scale of the deal presents limited exit opportunities for prospective buyers, according to market analysts, with some potential for the property to be broken up into smaller segments for sale.

Market Revival 

M+S’s effort to sell Marina One is the latest sign of optimism in a Singapore market which is seeing rising tenant demand at the same time that it faces a dearth of new office project launches. 

Apart from the Shaw Tower on Beach Road, which is set to add 450,000 square feet of new space to the market when it is completed this year, Singapore has no major new office projects on the way in its key commercial hubs until 2028, according to agency reports.

Grade A office vacancy in the central business district is predicted by Cushman & Wakefield to fall below 4 percent this year with average rents in the downtown area expected to climb 4 to 7 percent during 2026, after having climbed 2.4 percent last year.