The Ranz Review: 14 Freehold Homes Above Rangoon Road Retail

The Ranz is a freehold five-storey development at 109 Rangoon Road with 14 apartments above three strata retail units, and it has no pool and no gym. It received its Temporary Occupation Permit in September 2025. Freehold tenure three minutes from Farrer Park MRT is the reason to look. A project this small is the reason to be careful about what you pay.

Fourteen units generate almost no transaction record, which means neither you nor a valuer will have much local evidence when it comes time to price an offer or a resale.

At a glance

Item	Detail
Address	109 Rangoon Road, District 8
Region	Rest of Central Region, city fringe
Tenure	Freehold
Scale	Five storeys, 14 apartments and three strata retail units
Land	5,298 sq ft, assembled from 109 and 111 Rangoon Road, bought June 2022 for $14 million
Developer	Kefi Development
Architect	ADDP Architects
Status	Completed, TOP September 2025

Two of the fourteen are nothing like the other twelve

The residential mix splits at the extremes. Two four-bedroom duplexes of 2,357 and 2,368 sq ft occupy the top, each with a 5.4m ceiling in the living area. The remaining twelve are two-bedroom-plus-study units of 689 to 775 sq ft.

There is nothing between 775 sq ft and 2,357 sq ft. A household that wants three bedrooms, or 1,200 sq ft, has no option here and will look elsewhere.

That gap matters on exit. The twelve smaller units compete against each other and against far larger nearby projects offering the same layout with facilities. The two duplexes have no comparable unit inside the development and few outside it, so their value rests on finding a buyer who specifically wants volume and freehold tenure on the city fringe. That buyer exists. There are not many of them in any given quarter.

What the land cost does and does not tell you

Kefi Development bought two adjoining shophouses on the site, formerly the Eng Hin & Co Building, in June 2022 for $14 million across 5,298 sq ft of land. That was before the April 2023 stamp duty revision, and the caveat is a matter of record rather than a marketing claim.

The number is useful as context and misleading as a benchmark. Land area is not saleable area: a five-storey development produces considerably more strata area than the footprint it sits on, so dividing $14 million by 5,298 sq ft overstates the developer’s cost per saleable square foot. The gross floor area needed to do that arithmetic properly is not public.

What it does tell you is that the basis was set in 2022 and the project is small enough that the developer does not need volume to clear it. Do not expect the pricing urgency that a 700-unit launch shows in its fourth quarter of sales.

URA’s non-landed price index stood at 210.6 in 2026-Q2 against 210.8 in 2026-Q1, so the wider market has been flat for two quarters. Any asking price here has to be justified by the address and the tenure rather than by market momentum.

Pricing itself is not meaningfully public for a development this small. Caveats appear in URA’s residential transaction search as they are lodged, but 14 units produce few of them, and a portal listing shows an asking figure rather than a transacted one. We hold the current price list and the caveats lodged to date, and will send both on request.

Our condo buying costs calculator converts an agreed price into the downpayment, stamp duty and cash you need before you negotiate.

Farrer Park in three minutes, with retail underneath

Farrer Park MRT on the North East Line is about a three-minute walk. City Square Mall is roughly five minutes, as is the Farrer Park Hospital and Connexion medical cluster and the mixed-use Centrium Square. Little India and the Rangoon Road food strip are on the doorstep.

The retail below is the part to think through. Three strata retail units on your ground floor bring footfall, refuse collection and operating hours into the building you live in. They also put commercial owners inside the same management corporation, and those owners want different things on signage, deliveries and access.

Ask for the management corporation’s by-laws and the minutes of any general meeting held since completion. In a 14-unit development, two owners with a different agenda can carry a vote.

The retail units themselves are commercial property and follow different stamp duty, GST and financing rules from the apartments above. Take separate advice if you are considering one.

No pool, no gym, and a small base to share the bill

Leaving out the pool and gym was a deliberate decision by the developer to hold maintenance charges down, and on running cost it works. There is no plant to service and no lifeguard cover to fund.

The offset is a fixed cost base divided by 14 apartments and three shops. Lifts, the façade, common lighting, insurance and managing agent fees do not scale down with unit count, so the charge per unit in a boutique development is frequently higher than buyers expect. Get the current figure and the sinking fund balance in writing before you assume a saving.

The larger cost is on resale. Many buyers, and most tenants using a portal filter, screen for a pool before they screen for tenure. A freehold unit with no facilities is a narrower proposition to market, and that shows up in time on market rather than in the headline price.

Who it suits, and the price discovery problem

The Ranz suits:

• a buyer who wants freehold city-fringe tenure and will not pay a monthly charge for facilities they do not use
• an owner-occupier drawn to the duplexes for ceiling height and volume rather than a landlord chasing yield on them
• someone who values a three-minute station walk and the Farrer Park amenity cluster over a resort-style development

The problem to price in is evidence. A 14-unit project produces a handful of caveats over years, not months. When you apply for a mortgage, the bank’s valuer faces the same shortage and will lean on larger, leasehold, facility-equipped projects nearby that are poor comparables. A valuation below your agreed price raises the cash you need, because the loan and CPF both work off the lower of price or valuation.

Freehold tenure is an advantage over a 99-year neighbour across a long hold. It does not compress the spread between a seller’s asking price and what a valuer will support in a development this thin.

Checks before you commit

1. Pull every caveat lodged in the development since September 2025 from URA’s transaction search, and read them as the whole evidence base rather than as a sample.
2. Get an In-Principle Approval and ask the bank what valuation it will use for this project specifically, before you commit to a price.
3. Request the maintenance charge, the sinking fund balance and the management corporation by-laws, including anything governing the retail units.
4. Visit in the evening and at the weekend, when the ground-floor retail and the Rangoon Road food strip are at their busiest.

Our resale condo due diligence checklist covers the documents to request, and the condo loan guide explains how a low valuation changes the loan and the cash.

Sources: EdgeProp, Koh Teck Chuan debuts as boutique developer with The Ranz, URA residential transaction search, URA private residential property price index, data.gov.sg, URA property data.