Indonesian Family Buys Bungalows on Singapore’s Nassim Road for $155M

Temasek Holdings-backed Cuscaden Peak Investments has sold three mansions on Singapore’s Nassim Road for S$206.7 million ($155 million), according to a company representative, with a market source identifying the buyer to Mingtiandi as a wealthy Indonesian family.

The two-storey good class bungalows at 42, 42A and 42B Nassim Road in District 10 changed hands for the equivalent of S$4,500 per square foot of land, a Cuscaden Peak spokesperson told Mingtiandi on Wednesday. The purchase gives the family adjoining plots spanning at least 15,131 square feet (1,406 square metres) each, with the consideration working out to around S$69 million per home.

While the total consideration is roughly 14 percent less than Cuscaden’s initial asking price of S$239 million last September, the source said the final price tag has set a new record high for the city’s billionaires’ row, confirming an earlier account by the Business Times. Mingtiandi understands the Indonesian family is looking to redevelop the bungalows for their own use.

The record-breaking sale comes as Singapore’s market for good class bungalows – the most exclusive landed homes in the country – plunged 54 percent last year to S$1.37 billion after hitting an all-time high of S$3 billion in 2021, according to an industry report by CBRE.

Neighbours with Facebook Founder, Embassies

The three homes are currently occupied by unidentified tenants, according to the Business Times account, while Cuscaden Peak declined to reveal the identity of the buyers. The mansions each have five bedrooms and a swimming pool and are located on a street which stretches from Singapore’s Botanic Gardens to the Orchard Road luxury shopping district.

The Orchard Road end of the street is less than 100 metres from the Tanglin Shopping Centre, which was sold to the family of Indonesian lumber tycoon Sukanto Tanoto for S$868 million in February of last year.

This latest sale tops the S$4,291 paid by local tech entrepreneur Tommy Ong when he bought a home on nearby Cluny Hill in May 2021 with Jin Xiao Qun, wife of Nanofilm Technologies International founder Shi Xu having paid the equivalent of S$4,005 per square foot of land for a bungalow on Nassim Road in March 2021.

With only around 2,800 such homes in Singapore each occupying at least 15,000 square feet of land, good class bungalows are considered the city’s most luxurious housing, and addresses on Nassim Road are top-tier.

While Realstar Premier, the appointed agent for the sale of the bungalows, had not responded to inquiries from Mingtiandi by the time of publication, its founder, William Wong, previously stated that the adjoining freehold plots can be turned into a multigenerational family home, according to an account by Bloomberg.

Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin is reported to have purchased an 84,500 square foot mansion on Nassim Road in 2019 for S$230 million with the embassies of Japan, Russia and the Philippines also located on the street.

Selling Off Luxury Housing

The latest transaction marks the second time that Cuscaden Peak, which purchased the property holdings of Singapore Press Holdings almost a year ago, has offloaded a good class bungalow in the past five months, following its disposal of a two-storey home along Yarwood Avenue last November for a reported S$29.7 million.

Cuscaden Peak, formed by a consortium of hotel tycoon Ong Beng Seng’s SGX-listed Hotel Properties, Mapletree Investments and CLA Real Estate Holdings (the largest shareholder of CapitaLand), took SPH REIT private last June.

The company also serves as manager and sponsor of SGX-listed Paragon REIT as well as owning and operating a portfolio of student accommodation properties in the UK and Germany in addition to having nursing home holdings in Singapore and Japan.

GCB Prices Rise

Cuscaden Peak’s Nassim Road assets adds to a string of high-end Singapore home sales in recent months, with the deal coming after three freehold bungalows on Chancery Hill Road were sold to local homebuilder Sustained Land in late March for just over S$61 million.

The news came shortly after a report by local media in September revealed that Chinese-born Singaporean billionaire Sean Shi, one of the co-founders of hotpot chain Haidilao, had paid S$50 million last year for a bungalow in Cluny Hill.

In its latest luxury residential sales report issued last month, CBRE said the volume of GCBs that changed hands in the second half of 2022 fell to just 18 homes worth S$613 million, which nearly halved the S$1.2 billion billion worth of investments made across 39 bungalows in the first six months of the year. While full-year sales dipped last year, the report noted that investments were still higher than pre-pandemic levels

The average price of GCBs across the city-state still rose 10 percent last year to S$1,952 per square foot from the average of S$1,773 in 2021.