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Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →Six freehold apartments forfeited in Singapore's S$3 billion money-laundering case will be offered at auction on Wednesday 28 October 2026, EdgeProp Singapore reported on 7 October. SRI Auction will hold the sale at 2.30pm at its Great World office, with five units at Nouvel 18 and one at New Futura on the list.
It is the second round of a disposal programme that began in September, and the first round was a hard one. According to EdgeProp and The Straits Times, 26 properties were put up over two days of auctions last month and four of them sold. The other 22 were withdrawn. The six new lots bring the number of properties from the case offered since September to 32, out of more than 80 that are due to be sold in phases until the middle of 2027.
EdgeProp Singapore, 7 October 2026, and The Straits Times, 23 September 2026.
What goes under the hammer on 28 October
Both projects sit in the prime central districts. Nouvel 18, in the Ardmore Park area of District 10, is a freehold development of 156 units in two 36-storey blocks, completed in 2014, EdgeProp reports. The five apartments to be auctioned there range from 1,335 sq ft to 6,125 sq ft, and are described as two-bedroom-plus-study, three-bedroom-plus-study, three-bedroom and five-bedroom units. Their indicative prices run from S$2,939 to S$3,558 per square foot.
The sixth lot is a four-bedroom apartment of 2,691 sq ft at New Futura, on Leonie Hill Road in District 9. Its guide price is S$9.8 million, which EdgeProp gives as S$3,642 per square foot. New Futura is a 124-unit freehold condominium completed in 2017, about a ten-minute walk from Somerset MRT station.
Related readUS: Freddie Mac auctions 1,968 delinquent loans, Fannie Mae opens bidsAll six are freehold, a point the auctioneer has stressed. Mok Sze Sze, managing partner of SRI Auction, told EdgeProp that the Nouvel 18 units give buyers several chances to secure a freehold home.
Proceeds do not go to a private seller. As with every asset sold from the case, the money is paid into the Consolidated Fund, The Straits Times reports.
How the guide prices compare with recent resales
The property site Stacked Homes, in a piece dated 8 October, set the new guide prices against resale deals it found in the two projects this year. At Nouvel 18 it lists a 1,862 sq ft apartment sold for S$6.6 million in August, or S$3,544 per square foot, and a 1,335 sq ft apartment sold for S$3.7 million in May, or S$2,772 per square foot. At New Futura it lists one resale, a 1,830 sq ft apartment sold for S$7.5 million in May, or S$4,099 per square foot, and says it is the only resale in the project so far in 2026.
Guide prices: EdgeProp Singapore, 7 October 2026. Resales: Stacked Homes, 8 October 2026. Units differ in size and floor.
The comparison is rough, because the units are not the same size or on the same floor, and three resales are a small sample. Read with that care, the Nouvel 18 guides sit in the same band as this year's two resales there, while the New Futura guide is below the per-square-foot price of the single resale Stacked Homes found. A guide price is also only where the conversation starts. In September, as the next section shows, the gap between opening prices and the bids actually made was the whole story.
Related readHow the US Treasury and Marshals sell forfeited real estateHow the September auctions went
The first tranche was spread over three auction houses and two dates. The Straits Times followed each room.
| Auction | Date | Offered | Sold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knight Frank | 17 September | 7 | 0 |
| SRI | 23 September | 10 | 4 |
| ETC | 23 September | 9 | 0 |
| Total | Two days | 26 | 4 |
The Straits Times, 17 and 23 September 2026. Unsold lots were withdrawn.
On Thursday 17 September, Knight Frank offered seven properties at Ocean Financial Centre: six apartments at Gramercy Park and Sloane Residences, and an office of 3,498 sq ft in Suntec Tower One. The Straits Times counted 65 people in the room, 30 of them registered bidders. Every lot was withdrawn after failing to reach its reserve. There was bidding, though. A 1,292 sq ft Gramercy Park apartment that opened at S$3.82 million drew 11 bids, the highest at S$3.75 million. The office opened at S$11.5 million and drew a single bid of S$8 million.
Bloomberg, which reported on the sales on 2 October, said the combined opening prices of the seven lots came to more than S$43 million.
On Wednesday 23 September, SRI offered ten apartments at Wallich Residence and Martin Modern from its Great World office, in front of about 70 registered bidders. Four sold and six were withdrawn. The Straits Times had given the guide prices as S$2.238 million to S$4.98 million at Martin Modern and S$4.4 million to S$6.8 million at Wallich Residence. A four-bedroom Wallich Residence apartment of 1,658 sq ft opened at S$5.55 million and sold for S$5.48 million. Two Martin Modern apartments sold for S$2.12 million, after four bids, and S$2.08 million, after one bid, both under the lowest guide price quoted for the project.
Ms Mok commented on the turnout afterwards. "I must say we were expecting more participation, based on the response from the (property) viewings," she told The Straits Times.
Related readBidding on a home in Western Australia: no conditions, no cooling-offThe same day, ETC offered nine properties at the UIC Building, eight luxury apartments and a factory, and sold none. A South Beach Residences penthouse of 6,727 sq ft, with a guide price of S$25.3 million, drew no bids at all. An 8,800 sq ft factory in Kaki Bukit opened at S$3.63 million and drew one bid, of S$3.1 million.
Where the published figures disagree
Three details of this story are reported differently from one source to another, and they are set out here rather than settled.
One Wallich Residence sale carries two prices
EdgeProp and Bloomberg give the price of the larger Wallich Residence apartment sold on 23 September, a 1,991 sq ft unit, as S$6.6 million. The Straits Times report of 23 September gives S$6.78 million. The S$16.28 million total quoted for the four sales uses the S$6.6 million figure.
The second concerns the number of Nouvel 18 apartments in the new sale. The opening paragraph of EdgeProp's report says four, while the body of the same report and The Straits Times, which covered the announcement on the same day, both say five. Five Nouvel 18 units plus one at New Futura gives the six lots that both reports announce, and it is the count used in this article.
The third is about one Gramercy Park apartment at the Knight Frank sale. The Straits Times reports that a 2,659 sq ft four-bedroom unit opened at S$7.55 million, drew nine bids, started with a first bid of S$4 million and reached a highest bid of S$6.7 million before it was withdrawn. Bloomberg describes what appears to be the same lot, a 247 sq m apartment with an opening price of S$7.55 million, and reports only that a bid of S$4 million was rejected. The two accounts agree on the opening price and on the outcome. They leave a different impression of how far below the opening price the room stopped.
Related readAustralia final auction clearance rate falls to 45.4%, Melbourne week aheadWhy bidders are holding back
The auction professionals and analysts quoted in the press describe a room that is curious but disciplined. Tan Tee Khoon, head of auction and sales at Knight Frank Singapore, told Bloomberg that the sales had generated a lot of hype. Olivier Gergele of EY-Parthenon told the agency that property bidders typically stop once a price passes their own estimate of fair value.
"It's becoming a buyer's market," Nicholas Mak, chief research officer at Mogul.sg, told Bloomberg. He added that sellers may have to be more flexible, without being seen as desperate to sell.
Two wider facts sit behind that. The first is tax. Most foreign buyers pay Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty of 60 per cent on a residential purchase, Bloomberg notes. The second is the state of the market itself. The Urban Redevelopment Authority's flash estimate of 1 October showed the private residential price index up 1.4 per cent in the third quarter of 2026 from the quarter before, while sales volume fell by about 30 per cent. Bloomberg called it the fastest quarterly price rise since 2024.
Auctions in Singapore were already slow to convert before the forfeited homes arrived. ETC's review of the first half of 2026, published on 27 July and summarised by the website Tribe on 4 September, counted 292 auction listings, the highest half-year figure since the first half of 2021. Thirteen of them sold, for about S$27.67 million, a success rate of about 4.5 per cent. Against that background, four sales out of 26 is a thin result, but it is not out of line with the market the lots were sold into.
Related readACT home auctions: one seller bid, no cooling-off and the seller's reportsOther assets from the case have done better. Bloomberg reports that at a Hotlotz sale of luxury goods, a Louis Vuitton bag estimated at S$12,000 to S$16,000 drew 81 bids and sold for S$87,000. Fourteen more Hotlotz auctions are planned, the next in November.
The disposal programme behind the sales
The scale of what is being sold explains why the auctions will keep coming. More than 400 police officers took part in raids across the island in 2023, and over 200 properties were seized, Bloomberg reports. Ten people were convicted. The Singapore Police Force appointed Deloitte Singapore in 2025 to manage and realise the seized assets that are not cash, and Deloitte said in late August 2026 that more than 80 properties and over 1,000 luxury items would be sold in phases from September 2026 to mid-2027, according to EdgeProp.
Property is only part of the recovery. Citing police figures, Bloomberg reports that about S$1.4 billion in cash and sale proceeds had been paid into the Consolidated Fund by the end of March 2026. Keeping the assets has had a cost too: the police spent S$5.26 million maintaining and managing them over the three fiscal years to March 2026.
Not everything is being sold in an auction room. The Straits Times reported on 5 October that three seized properties in Sentosa Cove are being marketed by expression of interest, rather than at auction, with guide prices from S$15.68 million to S$23.65 million. The newspaper names List Sotheby's International Realty as the agency. Nicholas Ng, head of land and collective sales at JLL Singapore, told The Straits Times that the method is often chosen for high-value properties because it is both transparent and confidential and lets a seller gauge interest. One of the three, a pair of houses, has a guide price of S$22.8 million; Bloomberg reports that they were bought for nearly S$29 million in 2021, more than S$6 million above the guide. The Straits Times adds that only one landed home has changed hands in that area this year, for S$13.6 million in January.
What comes next
The dates already announced fill the rest of the month and run into November.
- Thursday 15 October, 3pm: the first of the three Sentosa Cove expressions of interest closes, according to The Straits Times.
- Wednesday 28 October, 2.30pm: SRI auctions the five Nouvel 18 apartments and the New Futura apartment.
- Thursday 29 October, 3pm: the second Sentosa Cove expression of interest closes.
- Thursday 12 November, 3pm: the third closes.
One question has no date yet. Six apartments at Wallich Residence and Martin Modern were left unsold on 23 September, and EdgeProp reports that SRI is waiting for instructions from the authorities on whether and when to offer them again. Ms Mok told the outlet that those units are still drawing a healthy level of interest.
What the September results already show is where bidders were prepared to stop. The highest bid was S$70,000 under the opening price both on the Wallich Residence apartment that sold for S$5.48 million and on the smaller Gramercy Park apartment that was withdrawn at S$3.75 million. On the Suntec office and the Kaki Bukit factory, the single bids came in S$3.5 million and S$530,000 below the opening prices.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
