THE Clementi Mall, a new mall in which Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) has a 60 per cent stake, is scheduled to be operational by January next year, with Fairprice Finest, Foodfare and the National Library Board (NLB) as its anchor tenants.

The 99-year leasehold property is owned by CM Domain, a joint venture by SPH subsidiary Times Properties, NTUC FairPrice Co-Op and NTUC Income Insurance Co-op. The latter two own a stake of 20 per cent each.

When completed, The Clementi Mall will be a six-storey shopping complex boasting about 190,000 sq ft of retail space.

SPH said yesterday that the Housing and Development Board had handed over the core structure and facade of the mall to the mall management on Tuesday. Fitting-out works will start soon and are due to be completed in two phases.

Level one and basement one – comprising the supermarket and shops – are scheduled to begin business by January and levels three to five by March 2011. Level two, to be taken up by the Land Transport Authority, will be completed in mid-2011.

Fairprice Finest will take up about 20,000 sq ft of basement one, while the Foodfare foodcourt will occupy 10,000 sq ft on the fourth level. The 20,000 sq ft NLB will sit on the fifth floor.

The mall will also have a basement carpark with about 144 carpark lots. On completion, the mall will be linked directly to the Clementi MRT station on the third storey. By mid-2011, it will be linked to the bus interchange through the first level.

CM Domain won the tender for the mall late last year when it came in tops with a bid of $541.9 million.

Jones Lang LaSalle head of investments Stella Hoh had said then that the SPH-led consortium’s bid works out to $2,797 per square foot (psf) based on the maximum allowable retail net floor area (NFA) of 193,750 sq ft. Jones Lang LaSalle handled the tender exercise for the mall for the HDB. She added that including an estimated fitting-out cost of about $50 million, the unit price works out to $3,055 psf of retail NFA.

Knight Frank managing director Danny Yeo, using a lower fit-out expenditure assumption of $40 million, said then that the top bid worked out to about $3,003 psf of retail NFA. To achieve a 5.5 to 6 per cent net property yield that most investors would want today for such an asset, an average gross monthly rental of about $18 psf would be required, he said.

Source : Business Times – 4 Sep 2010