Japanese retail development
begins to show signs of life

Royal Ahold to quit Southeast Asia

Asia-Pacific’s largest mall set
to open in KL this October

First Courts store opens in Phuket

100 Lotus Supercenters in
China by 2006: CP Group

Revamps, renovations,
repositioning — S’pore malls go
all out to lure shoppers

HK’s CRE to slow expansion
plans in China

Schroder buys first retail
property in HK

Ikea’s largest Asian store
opens in Shanghai

Taipei 101 Mall set to open later
this year

Malls in S’pore fight back SARS
scare

OG to leave Great World City in
S’pore when its lease expires

More outlets outside Bangkok:
SF Cinema

Thailand’s Seacon Square earmarks Bt107 million for upgrades

 

CMT, Singapore’s first listed retail property trust, plans to add more ground floor retail space in IMM

Soon after established malls such as Parkway Parade and Far East Plaza underwent facelifts and repositioning last year to better capture their target audiences, five more malls have announced plans for revamps.

CMT, the country’s first listed retail property trust, is adding more space to Tampines Mall and Bishan Junction 8 to capitalize on potential rental returns from the malls’ prime locations in major housing estates, according to a report by The Edge Singapore.

The redevelopment will cost CMT a total of S$32.9 million (US$18.8 million), S$27 million of which will be spent on eight-year old Junction 8. About 74,000 sqf will be added to the mall’s basement, ground and second floors with the majority of the space going to the second level.

The additional space will bring Junction 8’s retail space to 274,000 sqf. A transparent canopy will also be built to link the shopping center to Bishan MRT station. Work on the mall has already started and is expected to be completed by next December. A total of 25 new shops will be built, and tenants have been secured for eight units.

New tenants will also be moving in to Tampines Mall when renovation works are completed by this November. The redevelopment involves decanting space from the fourth floor of the mall to create seven new shops on the ground facing Century Square. A covered walkway linking the two malls will also be built. Five of the seven new shops have already been taken up by “well-known food and beverage tenants” at rents above S$25 psf, according to the report.

CMT, which also owns Funan The IT Mall, expects the extra space in both complexes to pull in an additional S$5 million annually and to recover its investment in about six years.
Meanwhile, Pacific Plaza—jointly owned by Hong Kong-listed LET Pacific and Tawian’s Pacific Electric Wire and Cable, which has just 53,000 sqf of retail space and is managed by Jones Lang LaSalle, is repositioning itself as a mall for the young, hip, trendy and stylish people with purchasing power.

The mall, which has prime frontage on Scotts Road, has seen many of its tenants move out over the past two years due to flagging customer traffic. Once home to music store Tower Records, it had made unsuccessful attempts to go upmarket with tenants such as fashion labels Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein, Miu Miu and Prada Sports.

As part of the repositioning exercise, new tenants have been secured. Sports label Adidas will be opening a 1,500 sqf concept store on the ground floor space fronting Scotts Road that was previously occupied by Prada Sports, while homegrown music store That CD Shop will move into more than 5,000 sqf of space on the ground and second floor space vacated by Miu Miu, as well as the second floor lot previously taken up by Helmut Lang. Current rents at the mall are said to start at S$14 psf, with prime ground floor space going for between S$20 and S$22 psf.

Another mall that has gone niche is Tiong Bahru Plaza, which will be given a S$10 million facelift and repositioned as a one-stop center for shoes. With the redevelopment, the number of tenants in the shoe retail business will double from eight to 16. The mall has about 130 tenants.

It will also be renovated with some retail areas reconfigured to face the atrium while a portion of the basement car park will be converted into shops. Access to Tiong Bahru MRT station will also be improved. The renovations will bump up the mall’s space by 7,000 sqf to 192,000 sqf. Retail Mall Management, which runs the mall, expects to see customer traffic grow from 650,000 monthly to 750,000 monthly by the end of the year. It also hopes that average rents will go up by about 20%, from the current S$8 psf, when the works are completed, The Edge Singapore reported.

Meanwhile, CMT is completing the purchase of its fourth shopping mall, the IMM Building in Jurong, for S$264.5 million.

And like CMT’s Tampines Mall and Bishan Junction 8, IMM is set to undergo a major revamp starting in 2005. This will involve the redistribution of some 54,000 sqf of warehouse space onto more valuable ground floor retail area.

There are now more than 530 tenants in IMM, including hypemarket Giant and electronics retailer Best Denki. The mall also attracts around 1.2 million shoppers per month, mostly residents from the western part of Singapore.

With IMM on board and its asset enhancement programs in the works, CMT’s management firm says its unit-holders can expect yearly distributions per unit (DPU) to rise by more than 9.3% to 8.03 cents this year and 8.13 cents next year. This is significant when seen against the backdrop of the Australian real estate investment trust market—often used as a comparison to Singapore’s—where a 2-3% DPU rise resulting from a similar acquisition would be a typical benchmark. CMT’s current DPU generated by its three malls is 7.35 cents.

The firm says that it will continue to acquire profit-making mall across the island, especially the suburban malls near MRT stations, to its portfolio.