Liberty House Office Bldg Bought For S$92.2mil
SINGAPORE – A 5-storey office building at 51 Club Street has changed hands for S$92.2 million, which translates to S$3,193 psf based on the commercial property’s gross floor area (GFA) of 28,876 sq ft, reported The Business Times on Wednesday morning (12 April, SGT).
Known as Liberty House, the corner office property stands on a land plot measuring 7,180 sq ft that has a leasehold tenure of 999 years.
The asset is being divested by Singapore-incorporated Liberty Insurance. Previously, the company was called Liberty Citystate Insurance. Before that, it was known as Citystate Insurance.
The acquirer is Singapore incorporated company Union Property Holding. Its sole owner is Zhang Nie, the former Singapore oil trading head of China-owned trader Unipec, a unit of China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec).
Liberty House features “premium-grade office specifications” and was extensively refurbished in 2011. Apart from a private car park and an elevator that serves all levels, it also comes with a roof terrace that commands a breath-taking view of Chinatown and the CBD.
The property also enjoys a 60m-wide, dual-road frontage along Club Street. The aforementioned features were stated by marketing agent CBRE last October, when it launched the expression of interest (EOI) exercise for the sale of the commercial asset.
In addition, the office building is located close to several MRT stations in Singapore’s CBD, such as Chinatown, Maxwell, and Telok Ayer.
Liberty House is also near the premises of a private members’ club, The Chinese Weekly Entertainment Club, likewise for an upcoming 900-room hotel by Worldwide Hotels Group that is expected to be completed later this year.
While the commercially-zoned site is exempt from the seller’s stamp duty (SSD) and additional buyer’s stamp duty (ABSD), the buyer’s stamp duty for non-residential property was recently increased by two percentage points to 5 percent effective from 15 February 2023.
