Touring One Of The Cheapest Landed Estates In Bukit Timah: Inside The Leasehold Kingsville (From $3.9m)

As we all know, property prices in Singapore are still pretty high at the moment. Even older leasehold landed properties are not bucking the trend: at the time of writing, there were 4 units at Kingsville for sale, ranging from $4.7 million to $17.8 million (999-year leasehold.) The lease of Kingsville, located at Kings Drive in the Coronation/Farrer area, started in 1996, so it’s almost 30 years into its lease, which may lead you to think that it would be hard to sell a property here.

However, in 2024 alone, there were 4 sales in the area, each more expensive than the last: the first sale in 2024 was for $3.96 million and the most recent one in May, was for $5.15 million. Similarly, in 2023, there were 7 sales. This led me to wonder about the area’s appeal, so I decided to feature it in this week’s article. Let’s have a look! 

For those not familiar with the area, here’s the map. Immediately, I can see one reason why the landed estate is popular: it’s within walking distance to both Farrer MRT and Empress Road Market and Food Centre (according to OneMap, a 6-minute walk to both) Landed estates are often far from public transport and amenities, and Bukit Timah isn’t known for its large number of hawker centres and wet markets, so this is definitely part of the estate’s appeal.

There’s also Tan Kah Kee MRT nearby, which gives you access to the downtown line (Farrer Road is on the circle line), but 19 minutes may be a tough sell in Singapore’s hot weather.

Kings Drive is also very close to Bukit Timah’s famous schools (Hwa Chong, Raffles Girls’, Nanyang Girls’, SJI, Methodist Girls’, ACS, Singapore Chinese Girls’ etc) but they’re all a bit too far to walk to, with the exception of St. Margaret’s Secondary School.

Now that we’ve covered the nearby amenities, let’s take a look at the estate itself. As you may have noticed from the map above, another plus point about the Kings Drive estate is that there are many ways you can drive home: via Farrer Road, Holland Road, Bukit Timah Road Road etc. This will help you to avoid the worst of the peak hour traffic jams. (I used to have to pass this area when coming back from the office, and between 6-7 pm, the jam could get quite bad, so it was nice to have alternative routes.)

Another reason this leasehold landed estate is still in demand, even at almost 30 years into its lease, could be the relative scarcity of leasehold houses (as compared to freehold or 999-year leasehold) in the area. In other words, the entry price of landed homes in the area.  

Now that we’ve finished our tour – the Kings’ Drive estate isn’t large, it only consists of 3 short streets- how did you find this development by Tuan Sing Holdings? Before I sign off, I must mention that Nanyang Primary School is under 1 km from Kings Drive, a fact which may be of interest to parents who are keen to get their kids into Nanyang. Let me know what you think in the comments!