What nineteen rooms actually look like
Three condominiums, nineteen lettable rooms, and a price list that runs from S$600 to S$2,200 a month. Here is the whole portfolio written out, because a number is easier to argue with than an adjective.
Every co-living operator in Singapore will tell you they have "a portfolio". Almost none of them will tell you what is in it. So here is ours, in full, with the list price against every room.
We run three homes. Chiltern Park at 135 Serangoon Avenue 3, Ivory Heights at Blk 122 Jurong East Street 13, and Thomson Grove at 588 Yio Chu Kang Road. Between them there are nineteen lettable rooms. Not nineteen units, nineteen rooms. Kitchens, toilets, yards and living rooms are not on the list, because you cannot rent a yard.
The list
| Home | Rooms | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chiltern Park, Serangoon | 6 | S$600 | S$2,200 |
| Ivory Heights, Jurong East | 7 | S$800 | S$1,500 |
| Thomson Grove, Upper Thomson | 6 | S$700 | S$2,200 |
Two of the nineteen are master rooms with their own bathroom. Ten are premium rooms. Seven are standard. Five of the nineteen are approved for two people rather than one, which is a smaller number than most people expect and the single question we get asked most often before a viewing.
Add the nineteen list prices together and you get S$24,170 a month. That is the ceiling, not the takings. It assumes every room is let, on the day, at the asking price, which has never once been true for a full month and never will be. The gap between that ceiling and the bank statement is the entire business, and it is what most of the writing here is going to be about.
Why publish it
Two reasons.
The first is that we ask owners to hand us their unit on a master lease and to believe a number we put in front of them. If we are going to do that, the least we can do is show our own working. You can check the addresses. You can walk to the MRT and time it. You can look at the price list and decide for yourself whether it is a serious operation or a slide deck.
The second is more selfish. Writing the portfolio down forces us to look at it. Nineteen rooms is small enough that every one of them has a name, a photograph and a history, and big enough that you stop being able to hold it in your head. The list is the thing that keeps us honest when someone asks how many rooms are empty and the temptation is to answer from memory.
What is not in the number
The list price is the rent. It is not what the room costs to run. Bills, WiFi, the weekly clean of the common areas, the wear on the furniture we bought, the month a room sits empty between two tenants: all of that comes out before anything reaches an owner or us. A room at S$1,000 does not put S$1,000 anywhere.
That arithmetic is a separate piece and we will write it properly, with our own invoices, rather than gesture at it here. For now the useful thing is the shape: nineteen rooms, three addresses, S$600 at the bottom, S$2,200 at the top, and a three month minimum stay on every single one of them.
