Tag Archives: Volari

CDL, HDB top construction productivity awards

Developers City Developments Limited (CDL) and Housing & Development Board (HDB) have won Platinum awards for construction productivity.

The new award by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) gives greater recognition to stakeholders like developers, consultants and builders who play a crucial role in driving construction productivity in the built environment sector. The award integrates the previous CPA-Best Practices and Innovations and the CPA-Value Added Productivity.

BCA said a winning factor for CDL was their strong initiatives in influencing their consultants and builders to adopt safe and easy-to-build best practices in their projects to raise construction productivity.

Some key initiatives adopted by CDL included the use of prefabricated bathroom units, drywalls, and Building Information Modelling (BIM) during the planning and construction phase. As for HDB, it was their extensive use of precast technology since the 1980s to speed up the building process.

This included the use of precast facade with cast-in windows, columns, floor slabs, staircases and refuse chutes. BCA said the precast facade with cast-in windows helped improve the productivity of window construction by about 300 per cent.

Under the Builder sub-category, Chip Eng Seng Contractors won the Gold Award while the Merit award went to Kimly Construction and DLE M&E.

ADDP Architects was the only consultant to receive a Merit Award this year. Under the Projects sub-category, eight teams were lauded for their efforts in improving productivity of their projects.

Winning the Platinum awards were Tiong Seng Prefab Hub, ITE Headquarters and ITE College Central @ Ang Mo Kio, and VoLaRi, a private residential project by CDL.

Gold award winners include projects such as Punggol Green Primary School and HDB’s Punggol Spring estate. The winners will receive their awards during the BCA Awards on Thursday (May 16).

Source : CNA – 13 May 2013

Luxury apartment sector feels the rush

More deals clinched as sentiment improves, foreign buyers sniff around

Luxury apartment deals picked up in the second and third quarters of this year as a more cheerful mood spread to the upper realms of the private residential market.

The number of apartments priced above $4 million changing hands rose rapidly from just 15 deals in the first quarter of this year to 87 in Q2 and 210 in Q3.

The total of 312 apartments in this price range sold in the first nine months of this year are 11 per cent more than the 280 transacted for the whole of 2008, which was generally a quiet year for the Singapore residential market following the global financial crisis, notes CB Richard Ellis (CBRE). It analysed caveats information from URA’s Realis system up to Oct 12.

During 2007 – the peak year for the luxury housing market – a total 1,740 apartments were sold at over $4 million each. Continue reading