[SINGAPORE] National postal service provider Singapore Post (SingPost) has put up 10 Housing & Development Board (HDB) shophouses for sale and leaseback, The Business Times understands.
These properties, distributed across the HDB heartlands, are expected to fetch S$50 million in total. The Teban Gardens Road shophouse has the lowest asking price of S$2.4 million, while the one in Bedok North is the highest at S$7.1 million.
Gross yields for these HDB shophouses with a total strata area of 21,118.77 square feet range from 4.32 to 4.98 per cent per annum.
SingPost is the anchor tenant for 90.8 per cent of the space in these shophouses, with the remaining being leased out to external parties.
BT has reached out to SingPost over this sale-and-leaseback.
The company’s website showed it has 42 post offices remaining, after shuttering about a dozen in recent years amid the secular decline of the sector. These are located at properties formerly owned by Singapore Land Authority (SLA), ground floors of HDB shophouses and other commercial setups such as malls.
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Of these, the group owns more than half – all of those housed at former SLA premises and the majority of the HDB shophouses – and carries most of them under property, plant and equipment, and generally at cost on its book, based on information shared at a past analyst briefing.
The 10 shophouses – being marketed by CBRE – form the majority, if not all, of SingPost properties located at HDB blocks.
SingPost has said it would divest non-core assets and businesses, including the retail-commercial mixed development SingPost Centre, which was earlier valued at S$1.1 billion. This is to unlock value for shareholders.
The sale-and-leaseback of the HDB shophouses would likely result in profit for the company from the valuation uplift and cash inflows upon divesting the real estate.
The portfolio will be offered for sale via an expression of interest exercise that closes at 3 pm on Jul 30. Investors may buy the individual properties, one of the two clusters of five shophouses or the entire portfolio.
There are only around 8,500 HDB shop spaces available for private ownership, and the public housing developer is no longer releasing such properties for sale.
SingPost shares were 0.9 per cent or S$0.005 up at S$0.57 as at 2.25 pm on Thursday (Jun 19).
