SLA To Lead Shift Out Of CBD With Move To Novena

Source : The Business Times, February 27, 2008

It will rent space in IRAS building to ease office space crunch

Kicking off the initiative to move some government agencies out of the CBD to ease the acute shortage of prime office space, Singapore Land Authority (SLA) yesterday said it will relocate from the former Temasek Tower in the Tanjong Pagar area to Revenue House in the Novena area in Q4 this year.

Revenue House is owned by the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), which comes under the Ministry of Finance.

Along with the move, SLA is scaling down its space requirements by 24 per cent. SLA will release about 92,569 sq ft or seven floors in the former Temasek Tower (now known as 8 Shenton Way). It will take about 71,042 sq ft or five floors at Revenue House.

SLA's spokeswoman declined to disclose the rental level that the authority will be paying IRAS at Revenue House or the saving in rental bill from moving to a city-fringe location, but said: 'SLA will be paying market rent.'

Property market watchers reckon that office rents in the Novena area are about 20 per cent lower than in Temasek Tower. That, coupled with the smaller area SLA is leasing at the new location, could translate to a nearly 40 per cent saving in SLA's rental expenditure, they reckon.

SLA's spokeswoman said: 'Besides rental, we also have to bear in mind the varied needs of the wide spectrum of customers which SLA serves at its public counters and its own staff. We're happy to have found a suitable fit in Revenue House.'

The space that SLA will lease at Revenue House appears to be mostly area being given up by IRAS. The tax authority said it currently occupies 74 per cent of the building's net lettable area (NLA) of about 635,070 sq ft but with the impending lease to SLA, IRAS will occupy 63 per cent of Revenue House's NLA.

She added that after SLA's lease, there is no more space available in the property for further leasing in the immediate future. Other major tenants in the building include Singapore Customs, AC Nielsen Research, Rockwell Automation Southeast Asia and Suki Sushi.

SLA has managed to trim its space requirements partly because Revenue House has a larger floor plate than Temasek Tower, allowing the authority to better optimise its space usage.

In addition, less floor space is required because the electronic digitisation and microfilming of survey plans, documents, titles and transactions have eliminated the need for space to store hard copies. 'The pooling of shared office equipment and common facilities like meeting rooms also results in further saving on the amount of floor space required,' IRAS' spokeswoman said.

Besides SLA, the Infocomm Development Authority has said it will give up about a third of its space at Suntec City by relocating some divisions to the Mica building at Hill Street by year-end.

The Economic Development Board is also expected to vacate its offices at Raffles City when its lease expires next year and move into Fusionopolis at one-north in Buona Vista.

The Energy Market Authority, which is housed in Singapore Power Building on Somerset Road, and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, at Plaza by The Park on Bras Basah Road, have also been reported as likely candidates to move out of the CBD.

In his recent Budget statement, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the government has decided to relocate several agencies out of the Central Area to free up space of 20,000 sq m or more by first quarter next year for use by the private sector. The space being released, which will help to address the office space shortage in the near term, is equivalent to 20 floors or more of an office tower block in Suntec City.