Oh, is Singapore growing smaller? No… it is… the size of studio apartment is growing smaller. The new Kent Residences in Kent Road is building studio that squeeze a kitchen, a bathroom, a bed room and a bay window into 312 sqft. So, how large or rather how small is 312 sqft? Imagine a squash court, divide it into 2, that is roughly the size. An empty half court feels large. But now, put in a kitchen with microwave oven, stove, sink, fridge, washing machine and maybe a dryer since there is no drying yard, and some shelves for the kitchen ware. In addition, add a bathroom, a bedroom and a wardrobe. Ops. What about the dinner area, the living room and study area? Where are they? Hmm…

A TINY studio under construction near Farrer Park may well be the smallest private apartment to be built in Singapore.

It squeezes a bay window, a teeny kitchenette, a bathroom and space for a bed into just 312 sq ft - about half the size of a squash court.

The unit - part of the new Kent Residences in Kent Road - is the most extreme example of an emerging trend in private housing: compact, capsule condos within the city.

Targeted at young singles and property investors, some new studios have shrunk in size to as little as 300 to 400 sq ft, as developers try to make their homes more affordable amid rising costs.

At least 20 new projects launched within the past year have had units smaller than 500 sq ft, which was almost unheard of before last year.

Half of these projects went even further, cutting their smallest units to under 400 sq ft, making them on a par with those in famously space-squeezed cities such as New York and Hong Kong.

Shoebox-sized studios are not entirely new here. A few older condos like Mountbatten Lodge have units less than 400 sq ft in size.

What’s new is the recent proliferation of such projects, especially in Farrer Park, Balestier and Dhoby Ghaut. Most are built by boutique developers and have under 100 units.

Thanks to the property boom last year, home prices in these areas start at just below $1,000 per sq ft (psf) and go up to $1,600 psf. For a 400 sq ft condo, this translates to well below $700,000.

‘Construction costs are going up and space is becoming very expensive, so developers have to offer something that is affordable for the majority of home-buyers,’ said Ms Peggy Ngiam, project director of Huttons Real Estate Group.

Her firm has marketed several projects with unusually small units, including Thomson V Two in Upper Thomson Road, where half the 74 units were under 500 sq ft, with the smallest just 355 sq ft.

With a typical unit priced at a mere $377,000, the project sold out within a day.

In fact, most of these boutique projects are fully sold, and the most recent launches have seen good take-up rates.

Ms Ngiam said buyers are a mix of locals and foreigners. Some are single professionals while others are investors looking for good rental yields.

At Citigate in Rangoon Road, which was launched on Monday, 22 of its 32 units were sold within a day. The smallest unit, a 441 sq ft studio, is expected to fetch rentals of $3,000 to $3,500 a month, she said.

Small units also reflect growing demand from singles who want to live in the city on a tight budget, said DTZ Debenham Tie Leung senior research director Chua Chor Hoon. She said developers focused on building large apartments last year and may now see a shortage of small ones.

But other experts warned that buyers may not realise how small these units really are.

‘In the last market run-up in 1996, when prices got higher and higher, the units got smaller and smaller,’ said Mr Colin Tan, head of research and consultancy at Colliers International. Even then, those units were rarely under 500 sq ft, and came without today’s bay windows and air-con ledges, which eat into liveable space, he added.

While most projects offer showflats, the smallest units are often sold on the basis of their floor plans. At Kent Residences, which has just 13 units, buyers were shown only a model of the project and its floor plans.

‘In most cases, when people see the finished flat they have bought off the plan, they say it’s smaller than they expected. Can you imagine what that would be like for a 300 sq ft unit?’ said Mr Tan.

fiochan@sph.com.sg

Article obtained from straitstimes.com on 4th June 2008

Co-editor: It is not Bernard Leong. 

Yes, our very own Alice (member of ping.sg) got onto the papers on her campaign against VueStar. I knew about the entire campaign from the beginning and I admire her courage to pull through with all of Bernard’s unwanted comments (sorry, Bernard, but if your comments is anything to go by, I think you are surfing from Mars now, oh, link here and in the event that the comment is ever deleted, there’s always a pdf =P).

Of course, in short, what Alice is trying to do is to gather enough people (and resources, read: money) to get a class action suit against VueStar. This probably means they will be trying to refute whatever that VueStar is claiming against them and at the same time invalidate that patent.

Back to this thing about patent troll. No doubt there is a chance that VueStar might be a patent troll, but quite a number of companies are actually doing that. Besides concentrating on their main products, they go into placing land mines on patents and wait for people to step on these mines. Of course, if the products are valid and prototypes have been made, then there’s not much of a troll to talk about. It may just be a matter of cost-effectiveness to build and to market a product whose value is not known at that point in time. After all, it’s always important to time the market when pushing out a new product.

I have not read through the implications of Paul Smith’s remarks, but it’d be interesting if we can get a critical mass against VueStar. Strangely, Bernard stopped talking to me recently. Hmm… =(

LAST week, software developer VueStar was reported to be threatening legal action against website operators here unless they paid it an annual licence fee for using what it claimed was its technology.

This week, a response has come from among netizens - a PhD student is marshalling support to overturn the firm’s patent for the technology, which enables a user to find webpages by clicking on visual images instead of text links.

Ms Cheong Lee Sing, a Nanyang Technological University graduate student in her late 20s, has set up the website refutevuestarpatent.biz to gather legal and financial backing.

Her call to website owners who have received VueStar’s letters of demand: Fall in.

Ms Cheong, who has some experience with patent applications as part of her graduate work in digital image analysis, is also asking for legal advice and hopes to raise the $500 needed to file an application with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (Ipos) to ask it to strike down VueStar’s patent.

She is also asking for ‘prior art’, the legal term for examples of the technology already in use, which will make VueStar’s patent invalid.

She has not ruled out filing a class-action lawsuit if her website attracts enough support from affected companies and concerned individuals.

Full-fledged patent lawsuits here can run up to six-figure sums in legal fees.

It was reported last week that VueStar’s patent was to give its technology protection here and in several other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and that it was asking for between $200 and thousands of dollars from companies using its patented technology.

Ms Cheong described VueStar as a ‘patent troll’ - a company with no other legitimate business than to collect money by threatening legal action to protect the patents it has filed itself or bought from others.

VueStar managing director Paul Smith, denying the ‘patent troll’ label, said his firm is working on ‘a whole series of software products from security to directories’.

Ms Cheong, who maintains two other blogs, noted that despite widespread indignation in the online community, no one has ’stepped up’ to do something about it.

Frustrated by this inaction, she set up the site to organise the drive against VueStar, even though she is not among those personally affected.

She had at first wanted to do this anonymously, but soon realised few would give their trust or money if she did not ‘out’ herself. She said wryly: ‘I have already been called a scammer, and that I am actually working for VueStar.’

Unperturbed by her crusade, Mr Smith said: ‘I strongly advise her and other bloggers complaining about VueStar to get some legal advice, read the actual patent, and make sure their interpretation of it is correct.’

This is another in a series of recent online campaigns launched by netizens against perceived injustices.

Last year, online petitions were taken up after anime distributor Odex sent letters of demand to anime downloaders, demanding thousands of dollars. A petition was also launched at the height of a debate in Parliament over the law on sex between men.

chuahh@sph.com.sg

Article obtained from straitstimes.com on 4th June 2008