Jean Yip’s hair-raising foray into property development
The beauty mogul’s childhood passion for lifestyle ventures into beauty, haircare, interior design, and property investment and development has blossomed over the past three decades. She is now tackling the overseas property market.
Since the 1980s, Jean Yip has been a household name synonymous with hair and beauty salons. What is lesser known, however, is its association with real estate — the eponymous chairman of Jean Yip Group has been steadily adding property investment and development to its portfolio.
Yip’s fascination with hair, beauty and property began from her childhood days. Accompanying her grandmother to the hair salon sparked her fascination with coiffure. She was engrossed in watching the hairdressers at work, she recalls. “I was about seven years old then.”
When her grandmother decided to convert the family’s three-storey shophouse home along Malabar Street (now an air-conditioned indoor street within Bugis Junction) into a five-storey one, the precocious Yip insisted on being included in the discussions with building contractors. After her grandmother moved to a corner terraced house on Jalan Senyum in the Kembangan area, Yip used to walk around and check out the other houses in the neighbourhood.
“I’ve always had a love for anything lifestylerelated: hair styling, beauty, cooking, baking, interior design and property,” she says. “It was a passion that started when I was very young.”
Yip hails from a family of entrepreneurs. She grew up in the Bugis area, where her grandmother was famous as a porridge seller and her father owned a hardware business.
“Many of the shophouses along Malabar Street had a courtyard in front, very much like those on Emerald Hill Road,” Yip relates. “I used to love running up and down the street, pretending that I owned them.”
These days, Yip does not need to pretend-play. She owns a string of commercial properties, from the conservation shophouses along Liang Seah Street and Seah Street in the Beach Road area, to Club Street and Pagoda Street in Chinatown. She also owns shop units on East Coast Road, Bedok Reservoir and Hindoo Road.
“Many of our shops are prominently located,” she observes. “We buy not just based on price but on the potential of the area and whether we can add value to the property.”
Yip’s younger brother, Oliver, the group’s director of business development, adds: “Choosing the right tenant is also key.” For instance, the row of shophouses along Club Street, known for 19 years as Italian fine dining restaurant Senso, belongs to Yip. Senso was a tenant until it closed last April. The tenant today is UFit Health and Fitness, which opened its flagship 16,000 sq ft integrated fitness studio there.
In the popular East Coast F&B enclave, a landmark of sorts is NineThirty by Awfully Chocolate located at the corner of East Coast Road and Joo Chiat Road. What is lesser known is that Yip is the landlord of the F&B outlet, and the space is an amalgamation of four adjoining shop units.
Located above NineThirty on the first level is 9Round Fitness Gym on the second. In this case, Yip is not just the landlord, but also holds the 9Round master franchise in Singapore.
Yip established Jean Yip Holdings in 2002 as the holding company for her real estate portfolio. She started investing in commercial units close to 20 years ago, but has expanded into industrial and residential property development over the past decade.
When it comes to residential property, Yip believes in “buying only freehold”. Her first purchase was a unit at The Hacienda, a 109-unit, freehold condo on Hacienda Road, just off Upper East Coast Road. It was situated near her first hair salon at Katong Shopping Centre which opened in 1982. “I was only 23 years old then, so I could only afford to buy one unit,” she says.
She demonstrated her flair in interior design by adding a mezzanine floor to the unit. “I loved looking at interior design magazines and
I used to buy a lot of these magazines when I was studying in London,” she recalls.
When Yip and her husband Mervin Wee were expecting their first child, Cheryl, they decided to buy a bigger house. It marked Yip’s first landed property purchase: a single-storey bungalow sitting on a 6,000 sq ft freehold site on Tosca Street, in Opera Estate in the east.
“Property was more affordable then and we got the land at a cheap price,” she says. Instead of tearing down the old house, Yip kept the structure but did extensive addition and alteration (A&A) works to create her Spanish-style house. They moved into the bungalow on Tosca Street after their second daughter, Rachel, was born.
‘A FEEL FOR PROPERTY’
From there, Yip began to develop “a feel for the property market”. Every time she bought a new house, she would rent out her last property. “Over the years, I must have moved at least 12 times,” she says.
Just as she enjoys the bonhomie of friends and family at her annual Christmas Eve parties, Yip is equally enthusiastic at mobilising them to attend weekend property exhibitions with her. “Now they are all scared [of my invitations],” she says. “I love attending open houses, new project launches and property exhibitions.”
When it comes to identifying suitable properties or development sites to purchase, “I’m always the one who chooses”, says Yip. But she ropes in family members to join her in the various businesses.
For instance, her husband Wee is the group managing director of Jean Yip Group, while her son-in-law, Roy Fong, husband to her daughter Cheryl, joined Jean Yip Holdings as general manager two years ago. An architect by profession, Fong was previously with DP Architects before joining his mother-in-law’s business empire.
There is also Oliver, who has been a constant collaborator in all his sister’s business ventures – from the salons to manufacturing of her own line of beauty and haircare products, and property investment and development. As the director of business development at Jean Yip Group, Oliver spearheads market research, feasibility studies and does the number crunching before the company embarks on a new business or property venture. “Oliver does the calculations and Roy focuses on the design aspects,” says Yip.
BUNGALOW DEVELOPMENTS
Bungalow development began very much like Yip’s other businesses, with Oliver spearheading, by developing a Good Class Bungalow (GCB) on Olive Road in the Caldecott Hill Estate in 2010. “It was a very challenging site as it was situated on Caldecott Hill, and required a huge retaining wall,” relates Oliver. It has since become his home.
This was followed by the development of three bungalows on Kheam Hock Road, and the redevelopment of Yip’s GCB on Old Holland Road in 2011. “I bought a house that I refurbished 20 years ago, and I decided to rebuild it because the whole family wanted something more contemporary,” says Yip.
Next was the redevelopment of her former home at Greenleaf View, off Holland Road. The land was subdivided into two for the construction of two smaller detached houses for sale.
As prices of bungalow land soared over the past decade, Yip switched her focus from buying GCB sites to bungalow parcels of 10,000 to 20,000 sq ft with the potential for subdivision into smaller bungalows or mixed-landed developments for sale. This led to recent developments such as the three detached houses along 8 Dyson Road; two detached houses at 33 Shelford Road; and five houses (three terraced and two semi-detached) at 51 Chancery Lane.
“We like to develop property in locations that are within 1km of a good school,” says Fong.
The detached houses at 33 Shelford Road, for instance, are located within 1km of Nanyang Primary School and Raffles Girls’ Primary School.
Completed in October, the two houses have 3½ storeys and a basement. The house at No 33 has a built-up area of 11,639 sq ft and land area of 5,528 sq ft, while the one at No 33A has a built-up area of 11,049 sq ft and land area of 5,227 sq ft. Finishings include Italian marble flooring, quartz kitchen and bathroom countertops, top-end bathroom fittings and builtin wardrobes. The asking price is from $13.98 million apiece.
Another landed housing development to be completed in the middle of this year is at 51 Chancery Lane, located just off Thomson Road. The three terraced houses and two semi-detached houses will be offered for sale upon completion.
“We provide generous built-in spaces and where space permits, we try to fit two kitchens including a professional gourmet-style kitchen with two ovens,” says Yip. “We also include a swimming pool and a roof terrace for the house.”
Of the three completed bungalows at 8 Dyson Road, one has been sold and the remaining two have been tenanted. Each house sits on a land area of 4,500 to 5,000 sq ft. “We will hold the property for rent if we can’t sell it,” says Yip. “Freehold sites are becoming rarer, especially bungalow sites.”
Oliver agrees: “You can always tear down the house on a freehold site and rebuild it. And it can be passed on to the next generation.”
THE ENCLAVE
In January 2015, Yip acquired two adjoining detached houses sitting on freehold sites of over 7,000 sq ft each on Holland Road. The sites were amalgamated, and the houses were torn down and redeveloped into a 26-unit, freehold condo named The Enclave at Holland. It was completed in 2018 and launched for sale in June