Seven Landmarks Are Becoming Homes. Together They Add Fewer Than Bedok.

Marina Square opened in 1986 on land reclaimed from the sea, and CNA traced its four decades from that reclamation through its 1983 naming to the mall people know now. Owner Singapore Land Group said on 1 September that it closes on 31 March 2027.

The next day, Frasers Property said Yishun 10 — Singapore's first cinema multiplex, at 51 Yishun Central 1 — would cease operations on 2 March 2027.

One is a Marina Centre institution on a site of more than 360,000 sq m. The other is a suburban cineplex on 39,125 sq ft. What they have in common is what happens next: both come back with flats in them.

That is not a coincidence of timing. It is the visible edge of a change in what Singapore does with its older commercial buildings, and The Straits Times counted seven of these projects running at once.

From the reporting, the pipeline as it stands:

Unit counts, uses and dates as reported by The Straits Times.

Marina Square also gets a 304-key hotel, a four-storey retail mall, three towers and about 13,000 sq m of office space, and will link to the Pan Pacific Singapore, Parkroyal Collection Marina Bay and Mandarin Oriental. Union Square pairs its residences with a 20-storey Grade A office tower across a 735,500 sq ft development. One Sophia adds 122 strata office suites and 127 strata retail units.

Newport Plaza is the one already selling. The Straits Times reports CDL sold 140 of its 246 units — about 57 per cent — on 1 February, and that over 80 per cent had been taken up by 3 September. Prices started at $1.298 million for a one-bedroom, $1.968 million for a two-bedroom, $3.238 million for a three-bedroom and $8.28 million for a four-bedroom premium unit.

The reasoning quoted in the reporting is unusually candid.

Nicholas Mak, chief research officer at Mogul.sg, told the paper these are decades-old buildings naturally due a revamp, and pointed at the opportunity cost: keeping a mall purely for retail no longer brings the "financial returns that they used to enjoy". He warned the capital expenditure makes these risky, while calling them a positive form of urban renewal.

Keith Ong of RealVantage gave the cash-flow version, and it is the clearest explanation of why homes keep appearing in these schemes: pre-selling residences during construction generates liquidity when a developer needs capital most. Offices, malls and serviced apartments "often take years to stabilise and may deliver a meaningful return only when they are refinanced or sold". Flats, by contrast, can be sold outright and early.

That is worth sitting with. The homes in these projects are not primarily a housing-policy outcome. They are a financing instrument — the part of a mixed-use scheme that funds the rest of it. Ong describes exactly that flexibility: sell the residences, keep the mall for recurring income, refinance or sell the office and hotel later, possibly to different partners.

It explains the unit counts, too. If residences are there to de-risk the scheme rather than to be the scheme, you build the number you need, not the number the site could hold.

Add up the for-sale units in the reporting: 204 at Marina Square, about 110 at Yishun 10, 246 at Newport Plaza, 366 at Union Square and 367 at One Sophia. That is roughly 1,293 homes, plus 120-odd co-living apartments at JustCo Place that are rented rather than sold, and none at Orchard Central.

Roughly 1,293 homes, delivered between 2027 and 2031, across the most prominent redevelopment programme in the country.

For scale, the same newspaper reported last week that four government land sales sites in the Bedok planning area alone will inject 3,185 private homes between 2025 and 2028 — one of which, the New Upper Changi site, holds about 1,010 homes on 30,769 sq m of land.

Marina Square's site is more than 360,000 sq m and yields 204 homes.

The two are not doing the same job, and the comparison is not entirely fair — Marina Square's site carries a mall, three linked hotels, a new 304-key hotel, offices and serviced apartments as well, while the Bedok plot carries homes and little else. But that is rather the point. Central redevelopment is not a housing supply strategy. It rejuvenates districts, upgrades retail and office stock, and produces a modest number of expensive flats as a by-product of the financing.

When Singapore actually needs housing volume, it sells suburban land. The headlines go to Marina Square; the homes come from Bedok.

Almost all of them land in expensive postal districts, which is the second half of why the unit counts stay small: expensive land, expensive flats, fewer of them.

From our own read of URA private-sale caveat records over the trailing 12 months, splitting each district by what was actually sold:

Orchard Central and JustCo Place both sit on Orchard Road, in District 9 — the priciest district in Singapore on our blended figures, at a median $2,985 per square foot across 1,299 sales. Neither, notably, is adding any for-sale homes at all: one is converting retail floors to office for Deloitte, the other is retrofitting serviced apartments into co-living units for rent.

That is a quiet signal about Orchard Road. In the most valuable retail district in the country, the two current interventions are office and rental — not flats for sale.

Frasers Property says its 110-unit project will be the first residential launch in Yishun Central in more than a decade. On our numbers, that claim about scarcity holds up.

District 27 recorded 731 priced private sales over the past year. Only 136 of them were new sales. Yishun and Sembawang between them have been running on resale stock, and resale stock priced at a median $1,344 per square foot — against $2,005 for whatever new supply did appear, a 49 per cent gap.

That gap is the interesting part. It is wider than Orchard's 38 per cent, in a district where the blended median of $1,416 is the second-lowest of the 27 districts we can rank. A new home in Yishun costs half again what an existing one does, and hardly any new homes come up.

So 110 units is small in absolute terms and not small for Yishun Central. It is also, on this evidence, likely to be priced a long way above the surrounding resale market — which is what a 49 per cent gap on 136 transactions a year tends to mean.

One honest note: 136 new sales is a thin base, and a single project can move a median that thin. Read the direction, not the decimal.

The most interesting constraint in the reporting got the least attention.

Alan Cheong, executive director of research and consultancy at Savills Singapore, told the paper that centrally located JTC estates could be the first to benefit from a live-work-play model, pointing at one-north as an existing example. Then he named the blocker: industrial properties come with 30-year leases. For a residential component to be saleable, that has to extend to 99 years. Otherwise the homes have to be rented rather than sold — and, he said, developers may need further incentives to accept that.

This matters beyond JTC estates. A tenure mismatch is what decides whether a mixed-use conversion produces flats people can buy, or only flats people can rent. JustCo Place is the live illustration sitting right there in the same list: serviced apartments on Orchard Road being retrofitted into 120-plus co-living units, for rent, not for sale.

It is the same question JTC and the Singapore Institute of Architects are now studying formally on two Toa Payoh sites — whether light industry and homes can share a building, and what has to change in planning rules for that to work. Cheong's answer is that the lease is where it will be won or lost.

Three limits worth stating plainly.

On timing. Marina Square completes in 2031. Union Square and One Sophia in 2029. Yishun 10 has no stated completion at all. Only Newport Plaza, at 2027, is close — and it is already more than 80 per cent sold. Anyone reading this as incoming supply is reading a decade, not a cycle.

On scale. About 1,293 homes across seven landmark projects. That is a rounding error against national volumes, and we would not expect it to move any district's prices. What it moves is the character of six or seven specific places.

On price. Newport Plaza's published start prices run from $1.298 million for a one-bedroom to $8.28 million for a four-bedroom premium unit. Marina Square's 204 units are described as luxury homes running from three-bedroom apartments to penthouses. These are not affordability-relevant projects, and nothing in them is aimed at a first-time buyer.

And on our own figures. Our district medians are transacted URA caveats over a trailing window that under-lodges at the recent end, so counts are a floor. New-sale and resale PSF are not like-for-like — new sales are developer-priced units in launching projects, resales are standing stock of every age, lease and condition. In D09, two projects supplied 46 per cent of the volume; in D27, the new-sale median rests on 136 transactions. And none of these seven projects is in our transaction data at all yet, because none of them exists. The district figures are context for where they are landing, not a forecast of what they will fetch.

On the reported timeline: Newport Plaza in 2027, Union Square in 2029, One Sophia by end-2029 and Marina Square in 2031. JustCo Place's retail and co-living apartments are slated to open from January 2027, and Orchard Central's affected retail tenants must move out by 30 November 2026.

Yishun 10 has an announced closure date of 2 March 2027 but no stated completion date in the reporting.

Marina Square and Yishun 10 both close in March 2027, so the visible disruption starts well before any of the new space arrives.

There is no reason to expect so, and two reasons to expect the opposite.

The volume is too small to matter as supply — roughly 1,293 homes spread across five projects and six years. And the units being added are explicitly at the expensive end: luxury towers, freehold ultra-luxury floors, penthouses.

What redevelopment on this scale usually does to a district is the reverse. New retail, new offices, new hotels and a fresher public realm are the things that support values, which is a large part of why owners undertake them. Frasers said outright that adding Cuppage Terrace to its Orchard portfolio was about unlocking synergies across adjacent sites and long-term value creation.

This is general commentary rather than advice, and district prices depend on far more than any building programme.

The projects are not ours. Every unit count, site area, closure and completion date, floor and tower count, price, take-up figure, ownership detail and analyst quote — Marina Square's 204 units and 304-key hotel, Yishun 10's 110 units and 39,125 sq ft site, Newport Plaza's 246 units and start prices, Union Square's 366, One Sophia's 367, JustCo Place's co-living conversion, Orchard Central's office approval, the 3,185-home Bedok figure, and the views of Nicholas Mak, Keith Ong and Alan Cheong — comes from the reporting linked below. The 1,293 total is our own arithmetic on those reported counts, and nothing more than that.

The market figures are ours. The district splits are our own medians over URA private-sale caveat records, trailing 365 days, divided by URA type of sale: D09 at 686 new sales ($3,246 psf) and 605 resales ($2,350), blended $2,985 across 1,299 transactions; D27 at 136 new sales ($2,005) and 532 resales ($1,344), blended $1,416 across 731. The district ranking is from the same records run across all 27 districts clearing a 20-sale floor.

The caveats: transacted prices under-lodge at the recent end, so counts are a floor. New-sale and resale PSF are not like-for-like. A district median describes whatever transacted in it, so a district hosting a live launch reports that launch. D27's new-sale median rests on 136 transactions and should be read for direction only. And none of the seven projects appears in our data, because none is built.

The news:

• The Straits Times — More than retail: why Singapore commercial spaces are redeveloping to add homes and offices, 4 September 2026, including comment from Nicholas Mak of Mogul.sg, Keith Ong of RealVantage and Alan Cheong of Savills Singapore.
• CNA — Marina Square through the years: A timeline, 5 September 2026.

The data:

• PropKaki analysis of URA private-sale caveat records for postal districts 9 and 27, trailing 365 days to 8 September 2026, split by type of sale.
• PropKaki median transacted private-sale PSF by postal district, trailing 12 months, 27 districts clearing a 20-sale floor.

This is commentary written by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by The Straits Times and CNA. The project details and the views of the analysts quoted belong to those newsrooms; the unit arithmetic, the district analysis, the framing and the opinions are ours.

It is opinion and general information — not financial, legal or property advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Several of these projects have no announced launch date, price or unit mix, and all of those will materially affect what they are worth to a buyer.

Published 8 September 2026.