The Golden Wall Centre in Little India
Singapore’s Golden Wall Centre has been sold for S$276.2 million ($200.8 million) to the owner of one of the city’s budget hotel chains, according to an announcement on Monday by Edmund Tie & Company, which advised on the transaction.
A subsidiary of Worldwide Hotels Group, which owns Singapore’s Hotel 81 chain and five other hotel brands, won the rights to the 36-year-old office and retail complex in the city’s Little India neighbourhood via a collective sale by the owners.
Love Hotel Tycoon Buys into Little India
Worldwide Hotels boss Choo Chong Ngen
Worldwide Hotels’s winning bid came in at about six percent above the tender’s reserve price of S$260 million, which works out to approximately S$2,331 per square foot of built space, under the currently approved plot ratio for the 2,251.9 square meter (24,239 square foot) commercial site.
The acquisition may be one of the biggest buys yet by Worldwide Hotels boss Choo Chong Ngen, who built a fortune estimated by Forbes at $2 billion, starting from a set of “love hotels’ in eastern Singapore’s Geylang red light district.
Choo’s hotel portfolio now includes six hotel brands, 38 hotels and over 6,500 rooms, with Hotel 81 being the company’s best known brand.
Site Already Approved for Hotel Use
The Golden Wall Centre, which had earlier tried for a collective sale in 2016, is 50 percent owned by corporates with the remaining 50 percent owned by individuals. The complex sits within the Beach Road/Ophir-Rochor Corridor, which is envisioned by Singapore’s land-use planners as becoming a vibrant mixed-use cluster, according to Edmund Tie & Company, which was the sole marketing agent for the owners in the tender process.
The site occupies a corner plot at the doorstep of the Rochor MRT station on the city’s Downtown Line with a 180-metre triple frontage. The project is also within 400 metres of the Little India MRT interchange.
An application for hotel use of the property has already been approved by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, subject to compliance with conditions and requirements.
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