Frasers Centrepoint Bids S$955M for Former Zouk Site and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

Singapore’s development fever leads the regional news again today as the city’s best-known Thai-owned developer leads the bidding for a condo site which remains vaguely familiar from Mingtiandi’s misspent youth. Also in the headlines, Southeast Asia’s fine city is all about the tech economy, except for AirBnB, and China’s HNA Group may have a billion or so left to spend on a Thailand adventure. Read on for all these stories and more.

Frasers Centrepoint Bids S$955M for Former Zouk Site in Singapore

Frasers Centrepoint Limited (FCL) trumped nine other bidders with an offer of $955.4 million for a residential plot in Jiak Kim Street, the former site of popular nightspot Zouk.

And Allgreen Holdings emerged top among seven bidders for a residential parcel in Fourth Avenue, lodging a tender of $552.96 million. Read more>>

AirBehiNdBars: SG Court Charges Two Men For Illicit Home-Sharing

Two men were charged for renting out their condominium units for short-term stay via Airbnb on Tuesday (5 December) at the State Courts, in the first such case in Singapore involving rentals through the home-sharing platform.

Terence Tan En Wei, 35, and Yao Song Liang, 34, face four charges each under the Planning Act. They are accused of renting out four different units at D’leedon Condominium, located near Farrer Road, without the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s (URA) permission sometime in May this year. Read more>>

HNA Joins CP in Setting Up $5B Fund to Invest in Thailand’s Eastern Seaboard

HNA Group is poised to invest in Thailand’s biggest infrastructure development project, as the airline-to-hotels conglomerate switches its offshore acquisitions to align closer to Chinese state policy, eight months after its global shopping spree landed it under a regulatory spotlight.

HNA Innovation Finance, a unit of Chen Feng’s privately held HNA Group, will establish a fund with CT Bright, the investment unit of Thailand’s largest conglomerate CP Pokphand, to invest in the Southeast Asian nation’s US$43 billion Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) project, according to a source familiar with the project. Read more>>

70% of Mainland Developers Could Disappear in Five Years Says UBS

The number of property developers in China could fall from around 30,000 to only the single-digit thousands or even hundreds in the next three to five years as the country’s red-hot market cools, according to Swiss bank UBS Group.

A series of government policies to contain property prices in recent years has started to have an effect, with all key property statistics, including sales, prices and land supply in cities showing a slowdown since June, Hu Yifan, chief China economist at UBS, told a media briefing on Wednesday. Read more>>

Hopu Raising Up to $2.5B For Latest Mainland Fund

Chinese private equity firm Hopu Investments is targeting raising up to $2.5 billion in a new dollar fund to capitalise on the country’s state sector reforms and its growing consumer industries, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The capital-raising is the latest in a series by China’s homegrown private equity firms and comes as they have increased their dealmaking over the past two years. Read more>>

China’s CSCEC Joins Bidding for New Terminal at Former Clark Field

Seven groups, including large Chinese companies, have submitted offers to design and build a passenger terminal that would triple existing capacity in Clark International Airport, which is being positioned as an alternative to Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA).

Clark International Airport, formerly known as the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport, is located in Pampanga while NAIA – also known as Manila Airport – is the main international gateway to the Philippines. Read more>>

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