SINGAPORE – About 300 Housing Board flats could be built on the former site of Angsana Primary School in Tampines Street 22, based on proposed plans for a new residential development on the plot.
Proposed amendments to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) master plan, released on June 7, show that the 1.8ha site – about the size of three football fields – will be rezoned from an educational institution to a residential development.
The project will also have social and communal facilities to serve existing and future residents, URA said.
The authority’s online map shows that HDB was given written permission in May 2023 for the space to be demolished.
Property analysts estimate that the site could yield 270 to 350 HDB flats with its new plot ratio of 2.1. At this plot ratio, 2.1 sq m of floor area can be built for every square metre of land.
Mr Eugene Lim, key executive officer of real estate agency ERA Singapore, said demand for flats in Tampines is consistently high as it is located near employment nodes such as Changi Airport and Changi Business Park.
However, he said the site will not increase the supply significantly.
As the site is more than 1.5km away from Tampines, Tampines East and Tampines West MRT stations, flats built in a Build-To-Order (BTO) project there would likely be Standard flats, he added.
This means flats would have a five-year minimum occupation period (MOP) and no significant restrictions on the pool of resale buyers.
Under HDB’s new classification system for BTO flats, introduced in October 2023, units in choicer locations will fall under the Prime and Plus categories, which come with stricter resale conditions such as a 10-year MOP and a subsidy clawback.
Mr Lee Sze Teck, senior director of data analytics at property firm Huttons Asia, expects high demand for flats at the site, as the precinct has not had any new flats built since 2010.
“Demand should be robust when the flats are available for application, as the last BTO project launched in Tampines in August 2022 had high application rates,” he said. The Sun Plaza Spring project saw 17 or 18 first-timers vying for each of the 267 units.
Angsana Primary School moved to Tampines Street 61 in 2022. The school was formed in 2015 with the merger of Griffiths Primary, which had occupied the site since 1988, and Qiaonan Primary.
Separately, serviced apartments are set to be introduced to the GSM Building in Middle Road, based on a proposed amendment to rezone the site from a commercial building to a residential development with commercial units on the first storey.
Co-living operator Coliwoo, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of LHN Group, acquired the strata-titled building for $80 million in May. The group said then that it planned to convert the third to sixth storeys of the building into serviced apartments, which would yield an estimated 187 keys.