Chinese Developers Place Record S$1B Bid for Singapore Condo Site

A pair of Chinese developers has placed the highest bid ever for a Singapore real estate project as a joint venture between Logan Properties and Nanshan Group have offered just over S$1 billion ($722 million) for a residential site, according to an announcement late Thursday by the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).

The bid by the mainland joint venture was the first time that a land tender had exceeded S$1 billion in the city, and surpassed a twenty-year-old record by more than 32 percent. The next highest bidder, Hongkong Land affiliate MCL Land tendered S$926 million, more than eight percent less than the mainland offer.

The 88,660 square metre project near Queenstown MRT station on Stirling Road was put up for tender one month ago after renewed interest in the city’s housing market triggered an auction for the site which had been available for sale since 2010. The URA has yet to award the site to a bidder and is currently evaluating the offers.

Combined Site Brings New High Water Mark

The 99-year leasehold site is an amalgamation of a pair of plots, and is zoned to provide as many as 1,160 new homes. The tender process was started last month after a developer agreed to pay a minimum of S$$685.25 million for the site. Industry analysts cited in the Straits Times indicated that the Logan-Nanshan bid exceeded expectations by at least five percent.

Interest in building new housing projects in Singapore has rebounded this year after sales of private homes increased 18.6 percent in the first quarter of 2017, compared to the fourth quarter of 2016, according to a recent report from property services provider Edmund Tie & Co. The city’s housing market has been a prolonged slump following a series of cooling measure introduced between 2009 and 2013.

Logan Properties Shows Up With Another Record Offer

For Shenzhen-based Logan, the Singapore bid is the second time this year that it has pushed up land prices outside of China, after the company teamed with compatriot KWG Property Holdings to pay a record HK$16.86 billion (US$2.17 billion) for a waterfront residential site on Hong Kong’s Ap Lei Chau island in February.

Should Logan’s bid be successful, it would be the company’s second project outside the mainland. In a statement on its website, the top 100 Chinese developer was already calling its bid a success, and said it had been studying the Singapore market for some time. Logan’s partner, Nanshan, has bid in a number of land auctions in the past year.

While mainland developers bought up 29 percent of new land sold for development in Hong Kong during 2015 and 2016, and have become a growing force in that city’s real estate market, only one other known mainland developer bid on the Singapore site apart from the top-placing JV. Transplanted Shenyang builder Kingsford Development, which has been active in the island nation for some time, offered S$877 million for the site.

Did Local Players Miss Out?

While the mainland joint venture placed the headline bid, the majority of offers for the 21,109 square metre site came from familiar Singaporean faces.

Units of Singapore-listed developers Frasers Centrepoint, Oxley Holdings, City Developments Ltd, OUE, UOL and Tanglin Land were all among the companies making offers for the site.