Heritage real estate rarely clears this kind of rent bar, which is why the S$404,888 monthly bid for the Tanglin colonial bungalow cluster jumped out at me long before the April 17 award to TS Home. For a conserved estate, that number is startling. It annualises to about S$4.86 million, and it beat the next-highest shortlisted bid of S$288,888 by a wide margin. I’ve covered enough SLA tenders to know bidders usually price heritage constraints carefully, not aggressively.
That’s what makes Phoenix Park at 300–320 Tanglin Road such an unusual proposition. The 33 black-and-white buildings sit on roughly 610,487 sq ft of land, with an estimated gross floor area of 119,338 sq ft, mature greenery, and about 150 car lots. The cluster comprises 33 heritage buildings, including two 3-storey blocks, two 2-storey buildings and 29 single-storey structures.
Built in 1949 as staff housing for the British Far East Command and British High Commission, the cluster later housed the Ministry of Home Affairs from 1977 to 2001, before the National Heritage Board designated it a historic site in 2012. You can still read that past in the whitewashed walls, black timber frames, verandas, pitched roofs and tiled floors. These are hallmark features of black-and-white houses in Singapore, many of which were built between the 1900s and 1950s.
SLA’s Price-Quality tender, launched in September 2025, wasn’t just chasing rent. It wanted a lifestyle destination mixing wellness, residential use, co-working, F&B, retail and arts, potentially with co-living and gallery space. TS Home, a TS Group unit, now gets an initial five-year lease with a possible four-year extension.
Here’s the contrarian point: the eye-popping bid doesn’t automatically mean easy profits. Conservation rules, fragmented building types and the burden of programming a site this large can make execution harder than at a newer mixed-use asset. Dempsey Hill and Gillman Barracks show adaptive reuse can work, but both also prove curation matters more than square footage. This renewed appetite for heritage and boutique land parcels mirrors broader en bloc market momentum seen across Singapore in 2025, with collective sales like Thomson View and River Valley Apartments signalling that developer confidence in well-positioned, character-rich sites is firmly back.
