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A look at Stanley Ho’s foray into high-end Singapore property
- The late Macau casino tycoon’s real estate company Shun Tak Holdings has spent more than US$1.4 billion on property and land in Singapore since 2016
- Its residential projects are aimed at wealthy individuals and market watchers are wondering if they are on track for completion
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It was like buying a Lamborghini and not letting people know about it.
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First, there was frenzied anticipation over who would be buying a S$145 million (US$102 million) bungalow in Cuscaden Road, part of Singapore’s affluent Orchard district, in 2016.
Then mystery, as the identity of the buyer was not revealed for a week, said ERA Realty head of research and industry veteran Nicholas Mak. “A Singapore developer would have announced it. But maybe it’s his style,” Mak said.
The buyer was Stanley Ho, the high-profile billionaire owner of glitzy casinos in Macau, who died on May 26 in Hong Kong. The mansion was sold by the late Tan Hoon Siang, great-grandson of well-known local philanthropist Tan Tock Seng, who had bought the freehold property for S$18,591 in 1949.
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In the few years after the Cuscaden Road purchase, Ho’s real estate company Shun Tak Holdings, headed by his daughter Pansy since 2017, went on a very public buying spree in the heart of the city state. Singapore had always piqued the family’s interest, and the purchases came about a decade after an aborted attempt to bet big on the Southeast Asian nation’s gaming centre, the Resorts World Sentosa.
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