A ride through S'pore's property market

EVIA Real Estate is probably best known as a homegrown developer of executive condo (EC) projects, but co-founders Vincent Ong and Leslie Lim describe themselves as "accidental developers".

They had, at first, trained their firepower on bidding for industrial sites in government tenders, including Biopolis Phase 3 and Fusionopolis phases 3 and 5. Some of these were concept and price tenders, in which Evia made it through the concept stage of the competition - only to lose out on pricing, often to the big guns.

Mr Lim said: "So we lost and we decided to stay away from industrial land in Singapore."

Evia Real Estate, the outfit the duo set up in 2010, turned its attention to the Singapore residential sector. In a recent interview with The Business Times, Mr Ong said that in early 2011, the group triggered the release of two sites from the reserve list of the Government Land Sales Programme - sites in Bishan Street 14 and Lorong How Sun/Bartley Road. They failed to clinch the sites, the te…