Is The Greater Southern Waterfront Singapore's Hippest New Address?

With exciting plans for the Greater Southern Waterfront announced by PM Lee Hsien Loong, property punters are heading south in anticipation of prices shooting north.

- Stella Thng

Singapore may be an island, but with much of our coastline reclaimed and used for major industries like shipping and building a financial hub, actual seafront homes are rare these days. In online forums, some purists insist that only projects genuinely situated by the sea, like Sentosa’s The Oceanfront and its landed properties, and Keppel Bay’s Reflections, Caribbean and Corals trio of condominiums should be considered properly seafront, eschewing those with a huge highway between the projects and waterways.

With property being a bit of a national obsession, it’s no wonder that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had us all abuzz during the National Day Rally last August. By 2027, PSA International’s Tanjong Pagar, Keppel and Pulau Brani terminals, along with the Pasir Panjang terminal in 2040, will be moved to Tuas, freeing up prime land for redevelopment. “It will be an opportunity to reshape the Greater Southern Waterfront (GSW) into a new place to live, work and play,” said PM Lee.

Covering 30km of the coastline, from the Gardens by the Bay East area to Pasir Panjang, the GSW occupies 2,000ha of land – six times the size of Marina Bay and double that of Punggol. There will be a new business cluster in this coveted city-fringe location, currently home to multinational firms such as Google, Unilever and Cisco. It will include a new attraction similar to Universal Studios and a Downtown South resort on the revamped Pulau Brani. Most excitingly, this “Punggol by the Bay”, as christened by PM Lee. will see 9,000 new private and public housing units, with waterfront promenades, greenery and open spaces developed on the current Keppel Club when its lease expires at the end of 2021.