LIBERTY House, a five-storey corner office building at 51 Club Street, is being sold for S$92.2 million to a Singapore incorporated company wholly owned by a Chinese citizen who is also a Singapore permanent resident.

The price works out to S$3,193 per square foot (psf), based on the building’s gross floor area of 28,876 sq ft. The property is on a 999-year leasehold plot with a site area of about 7,180 sq ft.

The property is being sold by Singapore-incorporated Liberty Insurance, formerly known as Liberty Citystate Insurance, and before that, Citystate Insurance.

The buyer is Union Property Holding, the sole shareholder of which is Zhang Nie. A person of the same name used to be the Singapore oil trading head of Chinese state trader Unipec, a subsidiary of China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec.

Liberty House is near a number of MRT stations in Singapore’s central business district (CBD) including Telok Ayer, Chinatown and Maxwell stations.

The property was extensively refurbished in 2011 and comes with “premium-grade office specifications”, a passenger lift that serves all floors and a private parking facility with five spaces, CBRE said last October; that was when it announced the launch of an expression-of-interest exercise for the sale of the property.

The building has a roof terrace offering a panoramic view of the CBD and the Chinatown skyline. It also has 60-metre-wide, dual-road frontage along Club Street.

Under the latest Master Plan of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the property is on land zoned for commercial use.

Liberty House is a stone’s throw from The Chinese Weekly Entertainment Club, a private members’ club. A 19-storey hotel development by Worldwide Hotels Group, which will have about 900 rooms and commercial space, is coming up nearby and expected to be ready this year.

CBRE noted in its October statement that, with Liberty House being zoned for commercial use, foreigners and corporates are eligible to buy it with no additional buyer’s stamp duty or seller’s stamp duty. That said, the buyer’s stamp duty for non-residential property was raised by two percentage points to 5 per cent with effect from Feb 15, 2023.