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SINGAPORE: One Raffles Place, one of the most recognisable office developments in Singapore’s central business district, has drawn interest from several potential buyers, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg.
The property, which is being marketed for more than $2.3 billion (US$1.8 billion), has attracted interest from a range of parties including father-and-son property investors Raj Kumar and Kishin RK, Malaysian developer IOI Properties Group Bhd and Singapore-based asset manager CapitaLand Investment Ltd, Bloomberg reported.
Located in the heart of the financial district, One Raffles Place comprises two office towers and a retail mall. The development is among a growing number of commercial properties in Singapore drawing renewed attention as financing conditions improve and sellers show greater flexibility on pricing.
The majority stake in the complex is held by OUE REIT, which is backed by the Indonesian Riady family. The real estate investment trust owns 81.54 per cent of the property, while United Overseas Bank holds the remaining 18.46 per cent and occupies premises within the development.
In a February exchange filing, OUE REIT said it had begun an exercise with UOB to gauge market interest in the property.
A spokesperson for OUE REIT said the trust would decide on its next steps after evaluating the outcome of the exercise. UOB declined to comment, while representatives for RB Capital, the property firm linked to Raj Kumar and Kishin RK, also declined to comment. CapitaLand Investment and IOI Properties did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the interest, market observers say the scale of the deal presents challenges. The asking price is considered substantial, making it difficult for a single buyer to complete the acquisition. Similar concerns have surfaced in relation to Marina One, another major city-centre asset that has been linked to a potential sale valued at around $5.7 billion.
Based on the valuation of OUE REIT’s stake at the end of 2025, One Raffles Place was valued at approximately $2.37 billion. The property offers 65,309 square metres, or about 702,980 square feet, of lettable space.
Some potential buyers are also said to be weighing the likelihood of additional redevelopment costs. While parts of the complex benefit from long-term leases stretching centuries into the future, much of the development dates back to the 1980s. One of the towers and a quarter of the retail space are held under long-duration leases, while the remaining tower and 75 per cent of the retail component have leases that expire by the 2080s, according to people familiar with the matter.
IOI Properties, controlled by Malaysian businessman Datuk Lee Yeow Seng, has been steadily expanding its footprint in Singapore through a series of acquisitions. Most recently, the company agreed to acquire Asia Square Tower 2 for $2.48 billion.
CapitaLand Investment, which is backed by Temasek Holdings, manages stakes across multiple REITs and private real estate funds.
Raj Kumar and Kishin RK, meanwhile, are linked to several firms including Royal Holdings and RB Capital, and oversee a property portfolio in Singapore that includes RB Capital Building, located beside One Raffles Place.
This article (Singapore’s $2.3b office attracts interest from international tycoons) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.
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As Sales Director for a leading real estate prospecting platform, I’m in constant contact with small business owners. Many of the agents and brokers I speak to manage their own pipelines, their own marketing budgets, and their own day-to-day operations. And the biggest challenges they face are the same ones confronting small business owners across virtually every industry: how to generate leads, and then what to actually do with them once they arrive.
Most businesses can acquire leads, but adequately working them is often a different story. And since good leads in many industries are getting more expensive, they can’t afford conversion problems. Burning through expensive leads that could have become clients with the right approach is just bad business any way you slice it.
That makes it imperative to work every lead as efficiently as possible. Here’s why I believe it’s vital to create systems that support timely and targeted outreach, and what you should prioritize when doing so.
When revenue growth slows down, the default response for most small businesses is to spend more on lead generation. This instinct is understandable, because the law of averages tells us that more prospecting opportunities will naturally lead to more closes. What it doesn’t consider is the cost of those opportunities, and how unsustainable that cost can become at scale.
If you have a strong process for converting leads, acquiring more of them is a good investment. If you don’t, you’re spending a lot of money on leads you’re just going to burn through.
According to data compiled by Amra & Elma, the average cost per lead (CPL) across industries has risen significantly in recent years. Leads in sectors like financial and legal services typically cost hundreds of dollars each. Real estate is no exception, with an average CPL above $500.
When leads are that expensive, an agent that doesn’t reach them quickly enough or follow up past the first phone call might as well be throwing their money away.
But the solution isn’t necessarily to spend less on lead generation. It’s to ensure that every lead generated has a real shot at converting, which requires an emphasis on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and an honest look at what happens after the lead comes in.
One of the most consistent findings in sales research is that the timing of your first contact attempt matters enormously. Research published by the Harvard Business Review found that the odds of successfully contacting a new lead are seven times higher if you respond within the first hour than if you wait until the second hour, and more than 60 times higher than if you wait until the following day.
If a real estate agent (or any other kind of small business) has no formal standard for how quickly a new lead gets contacted, they’re already at a disadvantage. Without policies and tooling in place to ensure a meaningful touchpoint within that first crucial hour, outreach often ends up taking a backseat to other tasks. By the time someone follows up, the lead has often already moved on, not because they weren’t interested but because a faster competitor reached them first.
This is particularly true in real estate, where leads can come in at all hours and the agents who consistently win are the ones who have set up a way to respond immediately. But the underlying principle applies anywhere a prospective customer is shopping around: the first credible response frequently determines who gets the business.
Getting to a lead quickly is a necessary first step, but that’s the thing: it’s just one step in what’s usually a long process. Most prospects in high-value transactions don’t convert on the first contact, or even the second. They need multiple meaningful touchpoints before they’re ready to commit, and the research on this is unambiguous.
According to research by Invesp, 80% of sales require more than five follow-up calls to close. Yet 48% of sales reps never follow up with a prospect at all. That gap between what conversion actually requires and what most salespeople actually do is where an enormous number of leads simply disappear.
In my experience working with real estate agents, this pattern is especially visible. An agent will call an expired listing once, get no answer, and move on to the next name on the list. But that homeowner may have been out, or screening calls, or simply not ready to talk that day. What the agent needs is a structured follow-up sequence they can move the contact into instead of just forgetting about them: planned follow-ups over the coming days or weeks that mix phone calls with other outreach channels like email or SMS. This can’t be ad hoc, either; it’s more repeatable and successful when you have it ready to go ahead of time.
For small businesses outside real estate, the same principle holds. Whether you’re following up on a quote request, a trial signup, or an inbound inquiry, a clearly defined sequence of follow-up contacts with a clear goal you’re trying to achieve in each one will consistently outperform getting back to them when you have a chance.
Fixing the lead conversion problem doesn’t require a large team or a complex infrastructure. It just requires structure: a set of repeatable practices that ensure every lead gets worked properly, regardless of how busy things are or who is available on a given day.
At minimum, that structure should include:
It’s one thing to set targets around how fast you’ll contact new prospects or what follow-up steps you’ll take, but it’s hard to consistently achieve those goals when you’re trying to do everything manually. That’s why purpose-built tools exist to streamline these processes for entrepreneurs and sales teams in different industries.
Working with Vulcan7 has given me a front-row seat to observe the difference this kind of support can make. Real estate agents and teams that use our prospecting platform receive fresh seller leads with verified contact information in their inboxes every morning, and have access to a power dialer that allows them to place calls up to four times faster than manual dialing, drastically improving speed-to-lead times. A built-in CRM also holds contact information and seamlessly updates it based on the results of each contact attempt or follow-up. This allows even small teams or individual agents to create consistent and executable processes for working every lead they acquire.
Features like these shouldn’t be seen as luxuries. Today, they’re table stakes for entrepreneurs who are trying to succeed in an increasingly noisy and competitive world. The reality of modern sales is that the goalposts have moved: potential customers have less time and their problems feel more urgent than ever. They need to be reached faster and engaged more thoroughly than most people—even experienced professionals—are capable of doing without some kind of technological assistance.
Optimizing your conversion process doesn’t just give you a better chance to close the leads you already have in your pipeline. It’s an investment in every future lead you acquire as well. Remember, the return on your acquisition spend is directly tied to how well you convert.
Think about it this way. If your current process converts 2% of leads, and each one costs $200 to acquire, then chances are you’ll spend around $10,000 for every customer you actually close. Improve that conversion rate to 4% by working existing leads more thoroughly, and you’ve just cut your effective cost per customer in half.
Every new lead you bring in after that improvement is inherently worth more than it was before. This is why having a system that supports your reps at every stage of your funnel is a much better investment than simply dumping spend into buying leads.
In real estate, I’ve watched agents significantly improve their closing rate without changing their lead source or increasing their marketing budget. When they tighten their response time, commit to a follow-up sequence, and become more deliberate about how they approach different lead types, they have more of the kinds of conversations that actually lead to deals.
Most small businesses are not losing because their leads are bad. They’re losing because they don’t have a system for working them. The solution is faster first contact, structured follow-up, deliberate lead prioritization, and the right tools to support all of it. This is well within reach for any business, regardless of size or budget.
Build the process first, then scale the acquisition. When you work in that order, every lead you generate has a better chance to pay off.
Post sponsored by Vulcan7 Real Estate Leads
Abby Brennan
Abby Brennan is Sales Director at Vulcan7, a prospecting platform built for real estate professionals. She works with agents and brokers across the country to help them build more consistent, productive sales operations.
Company: Vulcan7 Real Estate Leads
Website: https://www.vulcan7.com/
There is a recurring pattern in the biographies of people who own property in Marbella. Many of them visited first as tourists, either on holiday or accompanying someone who owned property there. They enjoyed the experience. They started thinking about it. They came back. And eventually, sometimes after years of deliberation, they bought.
This pattern reveals something important about how the Marbella property market actually works. It is not primarily a market of spreadsheet-driven investors calculating cap rates and projected appreciation. It is a market of people who have experienced the place and want to own a piece of it. Understanding the lifestyle dimensions of this market is as important as understanding the financial ones for anyone trying to make sense of why Marbella maintains its gravitational pull decade after decade.
What visitors consistently report about Marbella, and what distinguishes it from other European sun destinations, is the sense of being somewhere that works at a genuinely high level. The infrastructure functions. The hospitality is polished without being pretentious. The range of dining, leisure, and cultural options is broader and deeper than the town’s size would suggest. The climate is generous. And the combination of mountain backdrop and Mediterranean coastline creates a physical setting of real beauty that photographs well but is better experienced in person.
This quality of experience is not accidental. It is the product of decades of investment, both public and private, in the physical and service infrastructure of the town. Marbella has benefited from a virtuous cycle in which the concentration of wealthy international residents and visitors has attracted the businesses, restaurants, and services that those residents and visitors want, which in turn has attracted more of them.
One of the features of Marbella that is difficult to communicate in property listings but is among the most valued by those who live there is the social infrastructure. The town has a genuine year-round international community, not simply a summer influx of tourists who vanish in September. There are established networks of residents from across Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere who have built lives in Marbella and who form the social environment that new arrivals enter.
For buyers who are relocating rather than simply purchasing a holiday property, this community dimension is often the deciding factor. Knowing that there is a ready-made social world to enter, that schools are established and well-regarded, and that the services and support networks necessary for comfortable daily life are in place reduces the friction of the transition considerably.
Crinoa Marbella has been operating in this environment long enough to understand the community dynamics as well as the property market, and they share this contextual knowledge freely with buyers who are navigating both dimensions of the decision.
The experience of living in or visiting Marbella changes significantly across the seasons, and buyers benefit from understanding this variation before committing to a property whose appeal may be calibrated to a particular time of year.
July and August are the peak summer months, when the population swells dramatically, the restaurants and beach clubs operate at maximum intensity, and the area has the full beach resort energy that its international reputation is built on. The Golden Mile and Puerto Banus are lively to the point of being overwhelming for some visitors during this period.
Spring and autumn, by contrast, are many long-term residents’ favourite seasons. The temperatures are comfortable rather than hot, the crowds have thinned, and the town’s actual character, rather than its tourist-facing performance, becomes more accessible. October in particular has a loyal following among residents who regard it as the best month of the year.
Winter is mild by Northern European standards and genuinely liveable, with an active local scene, manageable traffic, and easy access to amenities that summer overcrowding can obscure. The outdoor pools may be too cool for swimming, but the walking, golf, dining, and social life continue without significant interruption.
According to Statista, Spain receives more than 80 million international visitors annually, making it one of the world’s most visited countries, and the Costa del Sol accounts for a significant share of those arrivals. This sustained visitor flow underpins both the lifestyle quality and the property values that make Marbella such a consistent destination for international buyers.
For buyers who have reached the point of translating their Marbella interest into an actual property search, the key is approaching the process with the same care and diligence they would bring to any significant acquisition, while also giving themselves the time to experience the market rather than simply study it from a distance.
Visiting different areas in different seasons, spending time in neighbourhoods that represent genuine lifestyle options rather than simply viewing specific properties, and building a relationship with a local team who can offer honest contextual guidance all contribute to a decision that is well-founded rather than simply well-intentioned.
For buyers ready to explore Marbella properties for sale, Crinoa offers the combination of market expertise, portfolio depth, and genuine client focus that makes that exploration productive. Contact their team today to begin the conversation.
It would be incomplete to discuss the pull of Marbella purely in lifestyle terms without acknowledging that many buyers are also motivated, at least in part, by the investment case. The Marbella market has delivered meaningful long-term capital appreciation for buyers who entered at sensible valuations, and the structural factors that have supported that performance, international demand diversity, supply constraint, infrastructure quality, and fiscal incentives for non-resident ownership, remain in place. For buyers who combine a genuine lifestyle motivation with a rational assessment of the investment case, Marbella offers the relatively rare combination of a place they genuinely want to be and an asset that has a reasonable prospect of holding or growing its value over their ownership horizon. Crinoa’s team is ready to help buyers think through both dimensions of the decision and to find properties that serve both objectives well.
The post Marbella’s Pull: Why International Buyers Keep Returning to the Same Market appeared first on Social Lifestyle Magazine.
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