Seven Developers Bid for the Same Site. The Winner Still Paid 11% More Than Anyone Else.

On 4 August a waterfront plot at Berlayar Drive drew exactly one bid and set a price record for a Rest of Central Region residential site. On 15 September a much smaller plot at Lorong Puntong drew seven bids and broke that record by 6.4%. Between the two tenders, developer appetite went from one firm to seven — and land prices went up either way.

The bidder count, in other words, did not forecast the result. What is worth reading is not the winning number on its own but its distance from the six bids underneath it, and that is a thing a sole-bid tender can never show you.

The full bid list

Seven bids is enough to see the shape of the market's opinion, not just its top.

Every bid divides cleanly by the 129,093 sq ft of gross floor area, which is a useful habit: if a published dollar amount and a published psf ppr do not reconcile against the site area and plot ratio, one of the two numbers is wrong.

The six losing bids span S$1,256 to S$1,451 — a range of 15.5%, which is ordinary dispersion for a residential tender. The winner sits 11.1% above the top of that band and 17.9% above the losing bids' average. This is not a crowded auction narrowly won. It is six firms agreeing roughly on a number and one firm disagreeing.

The forecast was right about the market and wrong about the award

Consultants expected the tender to draw between four and eight bids, and forecast a land rate of S$1,350 to S$1,500 psf ppr. The bid count was exactly right. The land rate was beaten by 7.5%.

Look again at the table and the forecast turns out to have been accurate anyway. Six of the seven bids came in at or below S$1,451 — inside or below the forecast band. The range described the distribution of developer opinion perfectly well. It simply does not decide tenders, because a sealed-bid tender is not settled by the consensus. It is settled by the bid furthest from it.

Berlayar Drive did the same thing in August: forecast range S$1,100 to S$1,450, sole bid S$1,515, 4.5% above the top. This is the reusable point for anyone reading land-sale coverage. A consultants' range is a forecast of the market; an award is a realisation of the outlier. Awards should be expected to print above forecast ranges more often than not, and that is not, by itself, evidence that the market has repriced.

What a sole bid hides

Our August read of the thinning tender market, One Bidder, Record Price, still describes Berlayar Drive accurately. What these two tenders together rule out is the tempting causal story — that thin tenders produce record prices because there is nobody to bid against.

At Berlayar Drive one firm set a record with no competition. At Lorong Puntong seven firms turned up and the record went higher still. The difference is only in what you can see. With a sole bid, the gap between the winner and the market's view is unmeasurable. With seven, it is S$20.77 million, and it is sitting in the table above.

Bishan has not sold state land in twelve years

The last government land sale in the Bishan planning area closed in October 2014: a Lorong Puntong plot just southwest of this one, which drew 18 bids and went to Nanshan Group at S$731 psf ppr. It became Thomson Impressions, 288 units, launched 2015.

Eleven years and ten months later, the land rate is up 120.5%, or 6.86% a year compounded. The number of bidders is down 61%.

Fewer firms, higher prices. Those two move together more often than the intuition about competition suggests, because what has thinned is not demand for land but the number of balance sheets that can carry 40% ABSD, a five-year sell-down clock and construction cost at current levels. The firms still bidding are the ones for whom those constraints bind least.

What it would take from a buyer

Newmark's Wong Shanting and PropNex's Wong Siew Ying both put the eventual launch at or above S$3,000 psf, in line with CBRE. At that price, land alone is 53.7% of what the buyer pays.

Here is what S$3,000 psf asks of the neighbourhood, against CBRE Research's 2026 year-to-date resale medians for nearby 99-year leasehold projects:

The strongest 99-year comparable in the area trades at S$2,170. A launch at S$3,000 needs a 38% premium over it. The nearer benchmarks are kinder but not by much: Artisan 8, a freehold boutique project that debuted in August 2025, has sold 22 of 34 units at an average S$2,388, and Jadescape's highest resale to date was S$2,652 psf in July. A S$3,000 launch is 25.6% above the first and 13.1% above the second.

One more comparison is worth carrying. When Thomson Impressions was tendered, its land cost S$731 psf ppr and the finished units resell today at S$2,146 — land was 34.1% of the eventual resale price. On this site, land is 53.7% of the launch price before the first unit is sold. The developer has bought less room, which means the buyer inherits a thinner margin of safety.

The project is also small — about 140 units — which cuts the developer's execution risk, as SRI's Mohan Sandrasegeran notes, and cuts the buyer's exit liquidity by exactly the same mechanism. And it will launch into competition from Thomson Reserve, the 1,268-unit UOL, Singapore Land and CapitaLand project on the former Thomson View site at Bright Hill Drive, due in 4Q2026.

The number under the number

A winning bid tells you what one developer believes. The bids beneath it tell you what the industry believes. When those two differ by 11.1%, someone is wrong, and the tender does not settle which.

The honest reading of Tuesday's result is narrower than the headline: a record was set, by one firm, at a price six other firms declined to pay. The buyers who walk into that showflat in a year or two are the ones who will find out whether Eco World saw something the other six missed — or simply wanted the site more.

Bid figures, site area, gross floor area and comparable resale medians as published following the tender close of 15 September 2026, with resale medians from CBRE Research and realis as at 14 September 2026 for projects with at least five 2026 transactions. All percentages, spreads, per-square-foot figures and annualised rates computed, not quoted. Launch price estimates are the cited consultants' and not a TRIBE forecast. Methodology published. No spin.