A close look at the Australian A-team brought in to rejuvenate Singapore's Orchard Road

“We are delighted and see this as a strong endorsement of our expertise,” says regional director Peter Hyland, who’s heading the team from the Australian company’s overseas division Cistri to launch the project.

Cistri regional director Peter Hyland will be applying Australian expertise to the Orchard Road blueprint. Photo: Supplied

“We’ll be preparing a study to get the hard facts of what the real economic situation is in Orchard Road in a very detailed diagnostic way, with both local and international consumer and retailer research, to see how it’s performing now, what are its retail challenges and how it can move into the future.”

It is going to be a tough gig, however. The 2.2km shopping belt Orchard Road, flanked by shopping malls and shaded by massive Angsana trees, was once the place to shop in Asia with some of the world’s top brands, flashiest stores and most prestigious department stores, intermingled with great hotels, restaurants and upmarket bars.

Today, however, the vacancy rate is around 8.4 per cent, business is down and tourist numbers are falling.

Some of its problems are the same as retail in Australia and the rest of the world – competition from online businesses and an increasing number of malls as well as a failure to adapt to new market conditions to provide more experiential shopping and bring in new technology to lure millennials.

But others are particular to Singapore: rents are often too expensive to attract new tenants at a monthly average of nearly US$350 per square metre for prime property, prices are high as the Singapore dollar has been very strong, and there’s increasing local competition from the development of new shopping centres and a fall in the number of big-buying Chinese visitors.

There’s another major disruptor too in the mix, according to Alan Cheong, senior director of property company Savills Singapore. “The number of budget airlines now coming in, and budget flights, with more terminals at the airport, has opened up accessibility to the rest of Asia,” he says. “Locals can now more easily shop in Hong Kong and Bangkok which are both much cheaper.

“We’re also getting more budget tourists who don’t come to Singapore as a shopping destination. They lump it in with Malaysia and Thailand on tour packages and then compare the costs of goods. So they might come here to look and then carry on to those other countries to actually buy what they want. The culprit for Orchard Road is budget air travel.”

Evolving retail scene

Orchard Road is facing pressure from growing e-commerce and cheaper neighbouring tourist destinations. Photo: Supplied

But Mr Hyland is confident. He has plenty of experience from leading the Greater Springfield new city development in Queensland, recognised as the world’s best master-planned community by the International Real Estate Federation, the Urban Renewal Brisbane rejuvenation project and a major transit-oriented development in North Ryde, Sydney.

Meanwhile his team of Australian experts include directors like Jack Backen who specialises in economic research and analysis, Peter Holland, a leading property economist and retail authority, and retail strategist Sue Say who has worked on Melbourne’s Chadstone Shopping Centre, Sydney’s World Square and Melbourne Airport. They’ll be working with a consortium including DP Architects, transport experts Arup, the Future Cities Laboratory, DataSpark and Rider Levett Bucknall.

“Orchard Road is still a very successful shopping area and still world-class in terms of its retail offering,” Mr Hyland says. “But like any retail precinct in the world these days, there are a number of problems.

“There’s increasing physical competition, more shopping destinations both in Singapore and in regional Asia, more options with different ways to shop, like online, and there’s this evolution of what people are seeking in terms of experience.

“Our economic and urban design team has been involved in many retail studies in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, looking at performance and ways to improve it, and we’ll be applying that expertise here.

“The way people shop is changing, but retail still has the attraction and ability to underpin a major area of a city, and we’ll be unlocking ways to help drive its vibrancy.”

Aussie expertise

Other major retail strips in the world are expected to look to the blueprint for Orchard Road. Photo: Getty Images

While some may be taken aback that an Australian company has been chosen to head the project, it doesn’t come as any surprise to Russell Zimmerman, executive director of the Australian Retailers Association. In retail, he says, Australia punches far beyond its weight.

“We’ve had some tough times in retail in Australia and often, as a result, our retailers have come up with innovative ideas and have been so successful, they then spin off those overseas,” he says. “We have great companies like Cotton On, Just Group and Coffee Club, just a few of around 32 Australian companies who are now making waves overseas.

“We have a lot to offer the world in terms of retail expertise and we’re succeeding despite being one of the highest cost countries in the world, in terms of both rent and wages, having so many geographical challenges and a comparatively small population. Singapore’s Orchard Road has one of the highest rents in the world, but so does Sydney’s Pitt Street! It’s logical that retailers elsewhere in the world should take advice from us on how we’ve managed to compete so well.”

The blueprint, when it emerges later this year for the future of Singapore’s best-known shopping areas, is then also likely to be studied closely by other major retail centres around the world.

“There’s no doubt people are now also looking at London’s Oxford Street, New York’s Fifth Avenue and other major shopping areas around the world, and they’ll be looking closely at what we end up proposing for Orchard Road,” says Mr Hyland.