Touring Jalan Kembangan: Freehold Landed Homes Near Kembangan MRT For $3m+

A few weeks back, I covered Frankel Estate in East Singapore and readers asked to see more of the area: specifically, Siglap, Dunbar as well as Kembangan. I didn’t want to bombard you guys with too much of the East in one go, so I’ve covered some other estates in between but today, we’re back in the area again. This time, to see Jalan Kembangan and part of the landed enclave north of Frankel.

Now, Kembangan has landed homes spanning a huge area, so let me be a bit more specific about exactly which part we’re viewing. The area we’re covering is the parallelogram (4-sided region) west of Jalan Kembangan, namely the area bounded by Jalan Kembangan, Lengkong Empat, Lengkong Satu, and Lengkong Tiga. (There are actually two more roads in this “Lengkong series” – Lengkong Lima and Lengkong Enam that I didn’t manage to cover in this tour as they fall out of the geographical boundary of my walkabout. If you’re not conversant in Malay, Satu is 1, Dua is 2, Tiga is 3, Empat is 4, etc!)

As you can see in the MasterPlan excerpt above, a key landmark of the area is MINDS-Towner Garden School (the light yellow plot with the letter “E” in the middle.”) Southwest of the School is a short row of commercial units but, alas, nothing very exciting. It’s mainly “South Union Park”, an “understated restaurant with a laid-back vibe focusing on burgers, pasta & desserts” (description lifted from Google), and some tuition/enrichment centres.

Note: if you’re not familiar with MINDS, it is “one of the largest and oldest social service agencies caring for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.” (Description as per their website.)

I did a quick search of the sales history and was rather impressed to find out that the last 2 sales in Jalan Kembangan were Semi-Ds, which went for $3.25 million and $3.05 million respectively. Albeit being in 2021, post-Covid, it has been difficult to find freehold TERRACE houses at that price, let alone semi-Ds, so these transacted prices are quite interesting.

Jalan Kembangan is a huge but not very busy road (given its size.) It sort of reminds me of my first Kovan tour, which I had described as bustling and well-connected but too well-used for my liking. The road here is similar, but it’s nowhere as busy, thankfully.

In fact, one of the things that stood out to me about this landed enclave is the fact that there were no childcare centres dotted amongst the houses (that I saw at least! (Inno Montessori is housed with other commercial units and not directly in between residential properties, if that makes sense.)) I’m sure it’s very convenient for parents to have their childcare centre a few houses away but, it’s not that… shall we say, convenient for the person living right next to the childcare centre!

Lengkong Empat has condos on one side and houses on the other, so the condo residents will likely have to drive down Jalan Kembangan and its off-shoot roads to get home. (Although they can also enter via Jalan Eunos and Jalan Daud.) Despite that, this area was very quiet when I visited. This is in contrast to Jalan Daud – I had to drive through Jalan Daud to get onto Jalan Eunos to make it to the expressway back to town and the roads were quite well-traversed. I was one in a line-up of 5 waiting to exit onto the main road (which was really busy! Once you turn onto Jalan Eunos, Google Maps asks you to keep right to U-turn so that you can head onto the expressway but it’s not really possible with the non-stop morning traffic, so you need to make a big round.)

Despite the proximity of the PIE, I would say the neighbourhood doesn’t get too much road noise. I didn’t even know we were anywhere near the expressway till I came back and checked the Masterplan! Possibly due to the tall condos helping to block the noise?

I head back to where we started as there’s one more road we have not covered: Lengkong Satu.

The road here is so wide, even with a row of cars parked on one side, cars can still turn into the units. (I know as a car returned home as I was parallel parking, and turned into his/her home without any issues, even though I was right opposite his/her gate! (I wasn’t parking there, but was reversing past it.)

We’re now back to where we started and thus the end of today’s tour.

Before I end, parents probably want to know about the Primary Schools nearby. There are 3 within the much-discussed 1 km mark of most of the houses (but not all, so please do check for the specific property you are interested in.) These are: Telok Kurau Primary School, Eunos Primary School and East Coast Primary School.

Besides Inno Montessori, there are more than 10 childcare centers, more than 9 kindergartens, and more than 10 pre-schools within 1 km of the area, so definitely no lack of options! (You might actually have TOO much choice! (An interesting thing about choice is that some studies have shown that having too much choice isn’t actually desirable as it doesn’t make you happier!) 

But anyway, back to the topic at hand: property! 

I thought the area was very interesting as, although just across the road from Frankel, it felt like a completely different area. Although spacious, it doesn’t have the village-y (or kampong-y, in the Singaporean context) feel that Frankel does. However, it’s probably worth noting that the last Frankel semi-D transacted at $6.75 million (3 Jan 2023) so quite a bit higher than the last 2 Jalan Kembangan transactions. (If we widen our view to properties within 1 km, the most recent semi-D transactions were all above $4 million.)

So, given all the above, how do you find today’s estate? Let me know in the comments!