Former cop’s glam plans for Sovereign
AWEALTHY former Singapore policeman has surfaced as the fellow seeking a “warrant” to change the front door at glamour estate the Sovereign Islands. Ching Chiat Kwong is a cofounder of his country’s Oxley Holdings and he’s taken it on an international ride that has included Australia.
His Sovereign plan, subject to a city council tick-off, is to build 16 luxury apartments at the Sovereign Islands entrance.
His move is a personal one – he won’t be wearing his Oxley hat.
That said, the Sovereign venture is a minor one compared to an Oxley joint-venture in London which has resulted in a development that’s delivered more than 3000 apartments on a 16.2ha site fronting the River Thames.
In terms of Sovereign, Ching’s apartments plan is a major one.
The islands estate, embarked upon 34 years ago, does not have a single apartment and, in the space of months, it’s looking at the prospect of a double dose of them.
Ching’s plan has emerged only months after two young Gold Coast “doers” signalled they planned to fire up the estate’s first apartment development, Windsor on Royal Albert.
And it comes close to 20 years after Sovereign developer Lewis Land flagged that it wanted to build apartments at the estate’s front entrance.
The plan for two four-level buildings on what’s known as the Village Centre site was hatched before group founder Bernie Lewis died in 2004 but the project never came into being.
Ching’s plan for the same land involves two three-level buildings.
One of the buildings will include a ground-floor restaurant and bar, a patisserie, a marina-front outdoor dining area, and a marine and real estate sales office.
There’ll be 16 three-bedroom apartments – three more than in the Lewis plan – and a resort-style pool.
The commercial area is intended to serve not just Sovereign residents, but also visitors.
One-time policeman Ching is a double-degree holder with an entrepreneurial bent – in the past he’s sold real estate, travel tickets, and beverages.
His 13-year-old Oxley Holdings, one of Singapore’s largest owners of residential land, has a name for building shoebox apartments in its home territory.
Oxley had some short-lived exposure to the Gold Coast in 2018 via WA company Pindan, in which it had a 40 per cent stake.
Pindan bought a tower site close to the beach at Mermaid Beach but ran into trouble and was fully absorbed by Oxley, which sold the site.
Ching, personally and not wearing his Oxley hat, spent $5.6m in 2016 buying the Sovereign Village Centre and the marina that flanks it.
The land, for years, has been occupied by a marine sales offices and a two-level building that today houses a real estate office and a hair salon. It’s also a former Lewis Land base at Sovereign.
Ching’s buy also gave him ownership of 2586 sqm of vegetated land on the southern side of the estate entrance and backing on to Britannic Crescent. It was mooted in 2018 that Ching was looking at building apartments and shops on the marina site but that he was hamstrung until leases in the village’s buildings expired.
Ching’s project, like rival “Windsor”, is expected to have downsizing owners of multimilliondollar homes in the estate as sales targets.
The Windsor development is planned on a 2566 sqm site bought for $12.65m, a square-metre rate which shattered the Sovereign record. The men behind the project are building industry figures Brad Neale, 40, and Grant Fairley, 38, who previously teamed up to build an upmarket villa project at Broadbeach Waters.