Laguna Park owners to consider selling at lower price

Owners of units in Laguna Park, whose tender closed unsuccessfully on Friday, are now considering selling at a lower price.

The new price is said to be between S$950 million and S$1 billion.

The development’s marketing agent Credo said residents are likely to receive letters advising on the situation in the next two or three days.

Earlier, many property analysts said Laguna Park’s initial S$1.2 billion reserve price was on the high side.

Residents of Marine Parade’s Laguna Park streamed out of the gates at about 4.30pm on Sunday afternoon, after a 2.5-hour meeting to discuss the fate of the collective sale of the development.

Despite two bids being made when the tender closed last Tuesday, no buyer managed to put down a payment to seal the S$1.2 billion deal.

At that price, each owner would have received between S$2.1 million and S$2.3 million.

Residents MediaCorp approached all refused to come on camera, but off camera, it seems their views are mixed. While some are agreeable to accepting a lower price, other said they would rather wait for the market to pick up again before relaunching the collective sales process.

Some noted that while those present at the meeting were split into two camps, the entire meeting went by cordially.

They attributed this to the people management skills of the sales committee.

The question now is whether the sales committee will manage to garner the crucial 80 per cent consent level from its owners, with the lower price tag.

The sales committee has until December 19 to close a deal before the collective sale agreement expires.

If there is no deal by then, the entire collective sales process will have to be restarted again.

One local company, whose shareholders are based in Indonesia, more than matched the reserve price, at S$1.7billion.

But Credo said that by last Thursday evening, the firm decided to pull out because it could not get its bankers to provide the funds for the bid.

Credo said the second expression of interest came from a prominent local developer. MediaCorp understands the developer is now expected to further negotiate with the majority owners before settling on a firm price.

Source: Channel News Asia, 18 Oct 2009