Touring University Walk Landed Estate: Freehold Terraces And Leasehold Semi-D’s Near Botanic Gardens & MRT

11 min read

I recently toured conservation houses, which appear to appeal to only a very niche segment of property buyers. Today, I’ll be exploring another niche property type: 99-year leasehold landed housing! For freehold lovers, don’t worry, there are freehold houses nearby too, at Jalan Seni and its parallel streets. I’ll be briefly covering those during the walkabout too.

The leasehold houses at University Walk as you will see later, can get very large. There are even units going up to 11,000 sq ft in size! (which is rare as many leasehold properties usually run smaller in size.) One of the appeals of leasehold units: you technically get more space for less.

I say technically because sometimes the property owners have tremendous holding power and the prices they ask for often reflect that fact!

Yes, I know, we all want freehold landed, usually, the bigger the better. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford it. The beauty of today’s landed houses is that they’re very centrally located in Bukit Timah and close to Nanyang, ACS, SCGS and RGS. Alas, not within the 1 km benchmark, but close enough that your kids will be able to get to any of those schools easily. The ease of travelling to school is really important – I actually had friends who chose to go to different Secondary Schools (instead of the associated one) because they were tired of the commute! To be fair, their journeys were over an hour long… Though we did all label them traitors!

So if you’re looking for a landed house in this area, and have a healthy but not unlimited budget, you may want to look at the leasehold landed houses at University Walk or the freehold terrace houses at Jalan Seni/Ilmu/Adusan/Adat. Note that such is the appeal of freehold landed property in Singapore that, at the time of writing, there were NO freehold terrace units along ANY of these streets for sale. In comparison, there were several leasehold landed houses along the one street, University Walk, on the market!

First things first, let’s look at the tenure. The 44 houses in University Park are all semi-Ds, with 99-year leases starting from Feb 1994.

Next, let’s look at the price point. Well, the lowest asking price for a leasehold landed house at University Walk was $5 million at the time of writing. As mentioned, no freehold terraces were listed for sale at the time of writing, so let’s look at the past transactions.

The last freehold terrace houses were sold at:

• Jalan Seni (in Feb 2023)- $5 million (but less than half the size of the leasehold house, at around 1,800 sq ft)
• Jalan Asuhan (in Aug 2022)- $5 million
• Jalan Adat (2 units sold in Oct 2022)- $6.25 and $6.35 million.
• Jalan Ilmu – last sale in Oct 2021 was for a semi-D ($7.868 million) If you’re looking specifically for a terrace house, that would be in Jul 2019 at $6.25 million. (It has a bigger land size than the semi-D!)

So, the asking PSF for the leasehold is about half that of the freehold, despite a similar quantum. I must admit I was thinking “$5 million for a leasehold house???” when I first started writing this article, but now I can see why it makes sense for some buyers. (i.e. the ones that really want to live in this area, and need more space.)

Note: the last 4 transactions at University Walk (in 2022, none in 2023) ranged from $3.55 million to $4.15 million, with land sizes ranging from 2,314 to 3,225 sq ft, so if a smaller leasehold unit comes on the market, it may be possible to purchase a property here at a lower price.

Something interesting about the Jalan Asuhan houses is that you have terrace houses next to GCBs! This is nice because if you’re situated next to a GCB, you usually have more privacy than if you’re next to another terrace house. Although the GCBs here are on the small size – under the standard 1,400 sqm mark. (I know someone who lived in a GCB for over 30 years and only met her neighbour once, so that’s how private it can be! Not counting the festive season when they would visit each other, that is.)

OK, now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s move on to the actual walkabout! I’ll start with the leasehold houses at University Park, as they’re closer to the main road (Dunearn Road.)

You may have noticed that there’s a Shell station right outside the estate. This makes it very convenient if you want to walk out to get snacks but I do know people who would be concerned about the petrol fumes (or even the petrol station catching fire!) Also, it’s situated past the entrance to the estate, so you won’t be able to pump petrol then turn into your property. (You’ll need to drive further along Dunearn Road, and U-turn onto Bukit Timah Road, then U-turn back onto Dunearn Road. It would probably make more sense to pump when you leave your house and not when you return home! Or to pump at the Shell at Eng Neo.)

Note: Despite how well-utilised Dunearn Road is, I couldn’t hear the traffic noises from within the University Park estate, despite its close proximity.

Cross the 2 roads and you’ll get to Botanic Gardens MRT, only about 8 minutes away – a very short walk for a landed estate. (They’re usually much more inaccessible.) Obviously, Botanic Gardens is there too, so you’ll be very close to nature!

Dunearn Underpass is to your right. There’s also a bus stop with buses 48, 67, 151, 153, 154, 156, 170 and 186. (If you cross over to Bukit Timah Road, 151, 154, 170 and 67 even take you to MGS, whilst 174, 67, 74 and 852 take you to Hwa Chong, so that’s 2 more famous schools covered.)

Instead of residential houses, this part of the estate is College Green Hostel, a residence for post-graduate NUS students. Just a little further down (about 7 minutes walk away) is Adam Food Centre. Honestly, if you’re a foodie, I think that’s the best part of staying at University Park – being able to walk to Adam Food Centre because the car park is super limited!

From here, I can see the petrol station, so you can see how close the houses are to Shell!

OK now that we’re seen all that, let’s walk into University Park.

It’s a single dotted line for most of the road, so visitors can technically park outside your house. Unfortunately, parking space was in short supply when I visited as many residents were already parking on the road. (I actually had to park at Jalan Seni, which is unusual, as typically it’s easier to find parking spaces outside semi-D houses than terrace ones!)

Having said that, the houses here do have ample parking space, and many can fit at least 2 cars on their property!

As you can see, no one has had to use their rubbish bins to reserve parking spaces here.

Nonetheless, people have used up pretty much all the possible street parking space.

This is actually the only playground in the immediate area – the closest 2 would be Kheam Hock Park (which is further north and right next to the PIE so not a very relaxing place to play) as well as Kheam Hock Nature Way (next to Kheam Hock Road and much smaller.) However, it wasn’t super crowded when I visited.

From University Park Playground, you can take a shortcut to Jalan Unggas, behind which is the UBS Business University.

A closer look at the houses along Jalan Unggas. (This leads on to Jlalan Bahasa and then Jalan Seni, where we can find the freehold terrace units. However, you can also reach Jalan Seni via University Road, so I’ll take you on that path instead.)

Now that we’ve seen the park, let’s walk over to Jalan Seni.

I’d also like to point out how some houses on University Walk are located below the street level of University Road.

This is where Jalan Seni leads on to Jalan Bahasa – the houses are bigger there, so we won’t venture down that way, but I’ll show you a few more of the properties along the street.

As you can see, the houses at Jalan Bahasa appear to be elevated quite a bit above the ones at Jalan Seni (which would potentially block airflow.)

Jalan Seni has two streets: One is a through road to Jalan Bahasa (what we previously covered) and the other is a cul-de-sac. Let’s have a look at the cul-de-sac now!

This part of Jalan Seni must be pretty quiet as I saw some of the residents playing badminton on the street. (Behind where I’m standing now actually.)

Now that we’ve come to the end of our tour, which did you prefer: the bigger, leasehold houses at University Walk which are also more conveniently located, or the freehold, smaller ones at Jalan Seni? (For reference, it takes about 13 minutes to walk to Botanic Gardens MRT from Jalan Seni. 16 minutes from Jalan Asuhan, as opposed to 8 minutes from University Walk.) Let me know in the comments!

And if you’re one of those who don’t like leasehold landed tours, feel free to drop comments on freehold landed estates that you’d like to see covered!