Desmond Sim tipped to succeed ET & Co's Ong Choon Fah

Singapore

CBRE's head of research for South-east Asia, Desmond Sim, resigned last month and is heading for Edmund Tie & Company (SEA) Pte Ltd, where he is expected to succeed chief executive Ong Choon Fah, The Business Times understands.

Ms Ong, a veteran property consultant, has been the group's CEO since May 2015.

In January this year, Edmund Tie & Co appointed Christopher Ng as its chief operating officer. He is the youngest son of Roland Ng, president of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry. The senior Ng is the chairman of Edmund Tie & Co.

He is also the chairman and group chief executive of local crane rental company Tat Hong Holdings.

The Ng family is the majority shareholder of Edmund Tie & Co; it is understood to have first come on board around 2016, when there was a management buyout (MBO) of Cushman & Wakefield's stake in the company.

In 2019, the Ng family raised their stake when some shareholders retired.

Besides the Ngs, the other shareholders of Edmund Tie & Co today include five of its executive directors. Besides Ms Ong, the other four are Poh Kwee Eng, Margaret Thean, Ng Poh Chue and Nicholas Cheng.

The 2016 MBO also saw the property consulting group reverting to its original name after trading as DTZ Debenham Tie Leung (SEA) for about 16 years.

The firm was set up in 1995 by veteran property consultant Edmund Tie, who was the managing director of Jones Lang Wootton's Singapore office when he left the organisation earlier that year with a top-notch team.

In 2000, Edmund Tie & Co became part of the DTZ group. Things began to change again when DTZ was acquired by UGL in 2011 and in 2014, sold to a consortium led by TPG Capital.

In the following year, the TPG consortium merged two other firms it acquired with DTZ - US commercial real estate firm Cassidy Turley and Cushman & Wakefield.

Edmund Tie & Co, which operates in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, has a staff strength of over 400, according to information on its website.

Ms Ong, who is in her early 60s, is also on the Council for Estate Agencies, where she is a member of the professional development committee.

She is also chair of the Urban Land Institute's Singapore Council.

Mr Sim, her expected successor at Edmund Tie & Co, joined CBRE in 2012. Prior to that, he spent over 10 years at JLL, including in research and consultancy roles. The 46-year-old holds a bachelor's degree in real estate from University of Salford in Manchester, in the United Kingdom.