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."