Surbana Corporation is now targeting to roll out one township project each year after it crossed the 10,000 mark in home units sold.
“My target to them is to start one township a year,” said Lim Jit Poh, chairman of Surbana Corporation, in an interview with The Business Times, adding that the company is also in the process of obtaining more landbank in second-tier cities.
Surbana, Singapore’s first township developer in China, now has four existing townships in Shengyang, Xi’an, Wuxi and Chengdu, which are all at different phases of development. Each township will take nearly 10 years to complete.
Crossing the 10,000 mark was “a significant milestone” for the company, unparalleled by any Singapore developer in China, said Tan Kiang Hwee, chief executive of the group.
This came on the back of record sales in the Xi’an township development where 600 units or 90 percent of the units launched were sold in one day on October 1, only two days after the government’s announcement of new property tightening measures.
In the first nine months of the year, the company sold nearly 3,600 units, already surpassing the annual record of 2,622 homes in 2009. The developer still has 13,000 units in its pipeline that will be released for sale.
Surbana has sold 10,530 units of the 10,800 units launched since its first township home sales in 2005.
The company is now looking at new cities such as Tianjin, Nanjing, Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanning, said Puah Tze Shyang, chief executive of Surbana Land. “We are comfortable with second-tier cities because that’s where the growth is.”
Last week, it signed a memorandum of understanding in Nanning with a local construction firm to explore opportunities for land acquisition.
Surbana is also looking at how to replicate its China township model in other nations like Vietnam and India over the next three years.
To support its expansion plans, the company is considering establishing more private development funds, on top of the first Surbana Township Development Fund valued at US$250 million.