The Mews By E&O

The Mews is located at Jalan Yap Kwan Seng, behind the Stadium Negara steamboat restaurant. This restaurant is one of those old businesses. Once located at the iconic stadium, it has since relocated here. The food unfortunately has gone downhill too with the commercialization. 

The Mews address is not quite KLCC but close enough. My concern about this location is Jalan Yap Kwan Seng itself, which gets clogged up every weekday and weekends alike due to the crowd going to party at a not-so-straight club in the area. 

But then again, which part of KL is not jam during peak hours? However, the experience of driving almost 2 hours from Bukit Bintang to have dinner at the Stadium Restaurant one rainy night is still haunting me...

E&O is building 2 blocks of 38-storeys, with over 250 units ranging from 1-bedroom to 3-bedrooms apartments. There is no showroom to look at now but the scale model available at the E&O sales office seems to suggest that the set up and landscape will be similar to their flagship St Mary Residences, and with a bit of retro tinge. One wonders if in 3 years time, this concept will still be in fashion.

The 2 towers are arranged in 2 V-shapes forming a W, strangely... (unless I have my orientation wrong), they face away from the favourite KLCC Twin Towers view.

The 1-bedroom units appear to be quite hot, despite the over RM1.2million price tag. They are selling very fast. In fact, the best units are the corner type-A as compared to the intermediate type-A1. Of course, pay more for the type A. 

Unlike St Mary's, E&O has not announced that there will be any hospitality partner occupying part of the building. Perhaps there are no plans for this, and the Mews will purely be residential. Therefore, in my opinion, since 70% of the units are 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom apartments, this might make it a bit challenging to find tenants willing to pay the premium RM5psf rental in order to make this investment interesting.

So, it makes me wonder if the larger units are actually more viable here for own-stay or for rich people to keep as their play houses. E&O is partnering a well-established Japanese Developer, Mitsui to develop this project and it is understood that there has been a lot of interests from Japanese buyers.

Unfortunately, there is a massive glut of larger unit condominiums in the KLCC area resulting in price dumping for rentals. But this only affects the less popular projects like Glomac's Suria Stonor. Well executed projects such as Binjai-on-the-Park and Park Seven still commands good occupancy and rentals. So it is essential, for The Mews to be successful, it has to be done up to the standards of the other iconic projects such as the 2 mentioned, St Mary's Residences and the Troika. 

E&O is also cleverly marketing The Mews overseas before a proper launch in Malaysia to attract foreign buy-ins. With a large and strong foreign investment, it is likely most buyers will have the holding power to ward of any price dumps.  And holding-power is the all important word - since this is a commercial plot of land, the utility and city-hall rates are going to be an absolute killer, coupled with the hefty maintenance fee of RM0.60psf making even the smallest 1-bedroom unit costing over RM600 to keep.