House of Tan Yeok Nee changing hands

Option said to have been issued to ERC at over $60m for the Penang Road national monument.

Thu, May 31, 2012
The Business Times

By Kalpana Rashiwala

The historic House of Tan Yeok Nee, a gazetted national monument, is in the process of being sold, BT understands.

An option is said to have been issued this week for the sale of the two-storey freehold property at the corner of Penang Road and Clemenceau Avenue at slightly over $60 million.

The property, which has a strata area of about 58,000 square feet, is leased to The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. German fund manager Union Investment Real Estate AG is said to be selling the asset to private commercial-school operator ERC Holdings.

Chicago Booth - which has occupied The House of Tan Yeok Nee since it was restored in 2000 - is likely to continue leasing the space for a few years.

Savills is understood to have brokered the property's sale by private treaty.

The House of Tan Yeok Nee is named after a wealthy Teochew businessman who built it in the 1880s.

The Salvation Army bought the property before World War II but it was soon occupied by the invading Japanese army.

When the war ended in 1945, Salvation Army moved back into the property, which remained as its headquarters until it sold the premises in 1991 to the late Teo Lay Swee.

In 1996, Mr Teo sold the property, along with the adjacent Cockpit Hotel and open-air carpark, to a Wing Tai-led consortium for $380 million.

The consortium developed the Cockpit Hotel and carpark site into Vision Crest Commercial (an 11-storey office block) and Vision Crest Residential (comprising apartments) and restored The House of Tan Yeok Nee. The conservation of The House of Tan Yeok Nee earned the project a special mention under the Specialised Category in Paris-based Fiabci's (International Real Estate Federation) Prix d'Excellence 2002.

The House of Tan Yeok Nee is the last remaining traditional Chinese courtyard house in Singapore. Besides the courtyard layout of the house, its unique features include intricate wood carvings and gold gilding, chien nien cut-and-paste work, moulded ni su 3D panels and cia hua painting and calligraphy. Some 100 Chinese craftsmen were brought in for the restoration of these traditional elements, while the building was extensively outfitted with multimedia technology to cater to the needs of Chicago Booth.

In early 2007, the Wing Tai unit sold The House of Tan Yeok Nee together with the Vision Crest Commercial office block to Union Investment Real Estate for $260 million.

ERC, which is buying The House of Tan Yeok Nee, is said to be looking for additional campus space to cope with strong demand for its courses.

The group's main campus is at River Valley Road. It also owns over 40,000 sq ft or 92 per cent of the total strata area of North Bridge Commercial Complex, a six-storey building opposite Bugis Junction. Talk in the market is that ERC is expected to soon begin a nine to 12-month long spruce-up of its space in the 999-year leasehold property, with an eye on selling individual strata commercial units in the building. The space is already strata titled with unit sizes of about 500-600 sq ft, BT understands.

Over at Middle Road, ERC began a nearly $30 million retrofitting exercise in February to convert the 16-storey Prime Centre into a hotel with more than 300 rooms.

The hotel will have relatively small rooms ranging from 13 to 25 square metres but these will be fitted luxuriously. The target is to open the new hotel by year end.

The group bought the freehold Prime Centre for $103 million in late 2010 from Hong Leong Group. It is planning to open more hotels in Asian capitals.

This article was first published in The Business Times.