Republic Plaza at Street Level, 28 July 2024. Copyright Cedric Chin.
At the heart of Singapore’s central business district, on prime real estate, stands a 280m-tall skyscraper named Republic Plaza. The building is not visually striking, and most Singaporeans would be hard-pressed to point it out amongst Singapore’s skyscrapers. But the deal that led to its construction was anything but ordinary. Republic Plaza was, in effect, bought for a song. This deal was engineered by none other than Kwek Hong Png, the patriarch and founder of Hong Leong Group, and is a reminder of what is possible.
Peh’s reason for Kwek Hong Png’s changed fortune during the war is more prosaic. According to Peh, Kwek reasoned that the occupation would not last beyond a few years, so he chose as much as possible to be paid in British currency instead of Japanese military notes. As such, he earned a tidy sum and was well-placed to rapidly expand his business after the Japanese surrendered.
I should note that I do not buy this sequence of events. How could Kwek Hong Png have predicted that the occupation would have only lasted a few years? Before Freedom of Navigation, imperial powers creating independent trading spheres was a fact of life. There was no such thing as free, global trade; the Japanese Great Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere was a real thing that the Japanese wanted to keep in perpetuity. I suspect that he traded with the Japanese, switched currencies to hedge against one side or the other winning, and then parlayed survival into smuggling (and I have zero qualms about smuggling — in the post war period, anti-colonial sentiment in SEA was on the rise). I find Studwell’s version of events more credible.
Right before the [Asian Financial Crisis] hit in 1997, CDL signed 90 per cent of the tenants in Republic Plaza to six-year leases that would run till 2002.
(Caveat to my comments: my commercial real estate knowledge is strictly anecdotal; I am no expert)
Was Republic Plaza fully or largely occupied by 1997?
If it was, that implies to me that CDL ‘s leasing execution was a strength, since they either managed to sign tenants to six year leases while the building was still under construction with an uncertain completion date, or filled the building very quickly, or both
(Granted, the location was well placed. Even so, leases don’t sign themselves)
If there’s something in the case research that sheds light on the leasing effort, I’d be interested to hear about it
I love your response, @mgoodrum, because this is yet another example of someone seeing cues that I didn’t. I went back into the research and added a few more points to the bottom of the sources list:
16 June 1994: CityDev starts marketing Republic Plaza. “City Developments Ltd (CDL) has pre-committed 12 floors totalling 132,000 square feet or 17.6 per cent of the office space in Republic Plaza, its flagship building coming up in Raffles Place. This figure includes some 30,000 sq ft or three floors of the 66-storey office tower which will be occupied by CDL staff relocating from City House at Robinson Road.” NewspaperSG
17 November 1995: 75% of Republic Plaza office project rented out. NewspaperSG
27 April 1996, The Business Times: BofA to be biggest tenant in Republic Plaza. “With BofA moving in, it is understood that CDL would have an occupation rate of more than 90 per cent for the 750,000 sq ft of lettable space in its flagship building.” NewspaperSG
15 February 1997: 65% of Republic Plaza II space snapped up. (Republic Plaza II is the smaller, second building next to the tower). NewspaperSG
There’s a tendency in storytelling to elide the effort that made good luck possible - thank goodness for the newspaper beat writers who help fill the gaps in cases like this