Singapore Land Group said on 1 September that it will partially redevelop Marina Square, the 9.2-hectare complex on Raffles Boulevard that opened in 1986 as the first piece of Marina Centre. Three new towers go up beside the three existing hotels, the four-storey mall is gutted and rebuilt around its existing structure, and the whole thing is due by 2031. The mall closes on 31 March 2027. The hotels — Pan Pacific, Parkroyal Collection Marina Bay and Mandarin Oriental — stay open throughout.
What is being built
The residential piece is a 49-storey tower of 204 large-format homes, three- to five-bedders and penthouses, over 190 metres tall with Marina Bay on one side and the city skyline on the other. A 19-storey mixed-use block carries a 304-key hotel on levels four to ten and about 13,000 square metres of Grade A offices on levels twelve to nineteen, looking over War Memorial Park and the Civic District. A separate 24-storey block adds 260 serviced apartments facing Bay East Garden. Operators for the new hotel and the serviced apartments have not been named.
The mall's 76,000 square metres of gross floor area are being repositioned around food, sport, wellness and events rather than conventional retail, with a 700 square metre event venue on Raffles Boulevard, a 300 square metre atrium at its centre, and a 6,500 square metre public park built over the Stamford Canal along Raffles Avenue. A sheltered ground-level walkway and an elevated garden loop will link the complex to One Raffles Link, Millenia Walk, Suntec City and the coming NS Square. SingLand calls the result Singapore's first "hyper-mixed" development; the honest translation is a precinct designed so that its uses feed each other around the clock, which is what the original 1986 masterplan by John Portman also tried to do, inward-facing atriums and all.
The mechanism: URA's Strategic Development Incentive
The reason this is happening now is a planning tool rather than a market signal — the same way a land bid sets a launch price years before a showflat opens. SingLand received written permission on 31 August under URA's Strategic Development Incentive, the scheme that lets an owner of an older building in the city centre rebuild at a higher intensity in exchange for a genuine transformation of the site rather than a like-for-like replacement. Under it, Marina Square's allowable gross floor area rises to about 362,493 square metres before balcony and recreation bonuses. That uplift is what pays for three towers on land the group already owns, and it is why other ageing Downtown Core complexes — Tanglin Shopping Centre, HarbourFront Centre, Yishun 10 — are moving in the same season. Expect more of them.
What it means if you own in Marina Centre
A precinct that is being rebuilt around you is a four-year construction site first and a repositioned address second. From April 2027 the mall, its car park traffic and its footfall stop; through 2031 the piling and cranes are the neighbours. Owners at the nearby residential towers should price that in when planning a sale inside that window, because a buyer walking the block will. The other side of the same fact is that the addresses closest to a completed, well-run mixed precinct tend to close the gap on the rest of the district afterwards, and the district here is District 1, where the last twelve months of private sales in Roov's data show a median of $2,792 psf across 379 transactions. Do not price these 204 homes against that median, or even against the district's blended new-sale figure of $2,963 psf, which mixes mid-tier launches with the top end. The comparison that fits a 190-metre tower of three- to five-bedders over Marina Bay is the luxury tier, and Roov's own transaction data over the last two years puts that tier well above $3,500: Skywaters Residences, the one true District 1 comparable, a waterfront tower of homes averaging 3,000 square feet, cleared a median of $5,880 psf; Park Nova and 21 Anderson, both in District 10, cleared above $5,000; and the broad Core Central Region launch tier — Midtown Modern, 19 Nassim, The Avenir, Upperhouse — sits between $3,300 and $3,600. The experience of agents who work this end of the market says the same thing: $3,500 psf is the floor for what SingLand is describing, not the estimate, and where in the four-thousands and above it lands will depend on how far up the Skywaters tier the finishes and the unit sizes are pitched. A launch is not expected before 2027; when it comes, how to buy a new launch condo is the sequence from preview to ballot.
What it means if you are thinking of buying there
Two things to separate. The first is the new units themselves. Two hundred and four large-format homes at 190 metres over Marina Bay is a luxury launch, and a launch of that size in the Core Central Region will be priced above the district median by construction, not by accident. Anyone buying will be doing so under the full stamp duty regime — Buyer's Stamp Duty in its bands, and Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty at the rate for their profile, which for a foreign buyer is the largest single line on the completion statement. Roov's free stamp duty calculator gives the figure for any price and any profile before a showflat opens.
The second is the surrounding market. Marina Centre has been an office-and-hotel district with very little housing; adding a resident population, serviced apartments and a repositioned mall is the sort of change that shows up in rental demand first, from the offices and the hotels' own staff and guests, and in resale prices later. If you are weighing a nearby resale unit now, the question is not whether the precinct will be better in 2031 — it will — but whether the price already assumes it. Run the numbers on the resale unit against District 1's current median, and against what you can actually borrow, before the launch marketing sets the anchor.
The dates that matter: mall closes 31 March 2027; three existing hotels open throughout; completion targeted 2031; residential launch not yet announced.
Sources: SingLand's announcement of 1 September 2026, reported by EdgeProp Singapore (edgeprop.sg, "Marina Square to transform into 'hyper-mixed' 24/7 destination"), and Singapore Land Group's own release, "Marina Square's Next Chapter". District 1 figures are from Roov's URA transaction database over the last twelve months.