Around 45 percent of Lake Life’s buyers were first-time buyers, revealed developer Evia Real Estate and reported in the media.
“We didn’t expect such a big group of first-timers,” said Vincent Ong, Managing Partner at Evia Real Estate. “We found that Lake Life has a lot of them, and a lot are younger than the rest of Singapore.”
Lake Life, an Executive Condominium (EC) in Jurong, sold 521 out of its 546 units during its launch on 8 November – a record for the most first-day sales for both private condominiums and ECs since the government tightened mortgage rules in June 2013.
Evia noted Lake Life’s first-time buyers had an average age of 34, which is below the average age of 40 for all buyers at the project.
The company’s data also showed the combined monthly income of a unit’s buyers stood at $9,042 on average, while less than two-thirds of all buyers were unable to secure a housing grant to finance their acquisition.
The project is the first EC to be built in Jurong after 17 years. Since the government has earmarked the area for a major uplift, some of Lake Life’s first-time buyers came from as far as Tampines.
Notably, around 52 percent of the buyers live in Jurong, while 26 percent came from nearby areas like Bukit Batok, Clementi and Bukit Panjang.
20 percent said they do not mind moving to Jurong from other regions such as Yishun, Serangoon, Bedok, Woodlands and Pungol. Another two percent were from Tampines.
Buyers like Jurong for its wide choice of facilities and shopping centres, which are all part of the effort to transform the area into a self-contained regional commercial centre, said Ong.
“Perhaps another hypothesis is that these people don’t have the negative impression that Jurong is full of factories,” he said. “In my time, Jurong was a swamp. (But) it has become hip and cool.”
Muneerah Bee, Senior Journalist at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact her about this or other stories email muneerah@propertyguru.com.sg
