Billionaire father-son duo Raj Kumar, Kishin buy Scotts Square retail mall for S$310M
Singapore billionaires Raj Kumar and his son Kishin have acquired the Scotts Square retail mall in the Orchard Road area for S$310 million through a share purchase. The freehold mall has a gross floor area of 130,875 sq ft and a net leasable area of nearly 76,660 sq ft.
Singapore billionaires Raj Kumar and his son Kishin have acquired Scotts Square, a prime freehold retail mall in the Orchard Road area, for S$310 million. The duo signed a sale-and-purchase agreement for all the shares in Wharf Estates Singapore, which owns the mall, The Business Times reported.
The agreed price translates to S$2,369 per square foot (US$20,170 per square metre) of the mall’s 130,875 square feet (12,160 square metres) gross floor area. The transaction, brokered by property consultancy CBRE, is expected to close by November, according to Forbes.
Scotts Square has nearly 76,660 square feet in net leasable area and counts Bang & Olufsen and Vivienne Westwood among its tenants. The four-storey freehold retail mall forms part of a strata-titled mixed-use development that also includes two residential towers. It accounts for about 43.3% of the development’s share value, with the remainder held by owners of the apartments in the residential towers.
Scotts Square was put on the market in early 2024 at a guide price of S$450 million by property consultancy Savills. The price was later reduced to S$380 million when CBRE conducted an expression-of-interest exercise for the mall earlier this year. It was one of two malls in the Orchard Road area that Wharf Real Estate Investment had sought to divest from, according to a Bloomberg report in July. An agreement was inked later that month to sell the other mall, Wheelock Place, to property developer Hongkong Land for S$1.1 billion.
Wharf Estates Singapore, formerly Wheelock Properties (Singapore), is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong billionaire Peter Woo’s Wharf Real Estate Investment Company. Raj Kumar and Kishin ranked 19th with an estimated combined net worth of US$3.3 billion on Forbes’ list of the richest people in Singapore earlier this month. Kishin is also among the city-state’s few billionaires under age 50.
Through Kishin’s RB Capital and Kumar’s Royal Holdings, the duo oversee a multibillion-dollar portfolio in the city-state that includes the Holiday Inn Express at Clarke Quay, Holiday Inn Little India and InterContinental Singapore Robertson Quay. Earlier this month they agreed to sell Cuppage Terrace, a cluster of prime food and beverage shophouses in Orchard Road, to Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi’s Frasers Property for S$175 million after putting the property on sale in January.
