Villa Scott at Brickfields

Earlier we talked about Brickfields and the KL Sentral area which is seeing quite a lot of development lately. The government seems to think that Brickfields represents the Indian community in Malaysia and with the recent fall-out in the last general elections where droves of Indian votes desserted the governing party, the government decided to spend some money to spruce up "Little India" in Brickfields to appease the community.

With this good intention comes the gravy train and the haphazard implementation such as this pedestrian bridge complete with lifts on both sides. Nothing wrong with this except that the pedestrian bridge is one of the shortest we've ever seen.... The lifts are of course necessary as Brickfields is also the home of a blind community. This will really come a long way to help them cross this busy road.

Except that, on a slightly longer stretch, the same contractor has constructed a pedestrian bridge with a lift only on one side. Such a compassionate design...

Nevertheless, Brickfields has been seeing some kind of boom with new condos touching on RM800++psf. Over at KL Sentral, the new launches are all well above RM1000psf. But so it seems... the older ones are still struggling to hit the all time high prices of the newer or newly launched projects.

Villa Scott is situated over at the other end of Brickfields. It's one of the older condos and many years ago, I actually considered buying a 2 bedroom unit here for about RM250k. Well, those days are gone, and prices have since gone up beyond RM450k for a unit here. The larger 3 bedroom units, owners are asking for RM690k. Whether they sell it or not, I am not sure.

But one thing for sure, rental hasn't really gone up a great deal. There are 2 newer condos adjacent to Villa Scott now, Scott Sentral and 633 Residency. With competition... and a glut, and the ageing hardware inside the condos, Villa Scott can barely fetch RM3000/month for a fully furnished 2 bedroom unit.

If you buy a unit here for investment or own-stay, you'll need to at least gut and replace the bathrooms with more modern fittings and tiles in order to compete with the neighbours. That will set you back at least RM30k for the 2 bathrooms.

The floor is marble tiles for the living and dining area, including the corridors, cheap tiles for the kitchen and carpets in the bedrooms. The kitchen and bedrooms need to change at least, that'll be RM10k for some cheap laminated wood floors and modern tiles for the kitchen.

This large 1500sf 3 bedroom unit has a maid room and bathroom... not much need to change here. But definitely the cabinets have to go... RM2k to pay someone to remove it and another RM50k to get a new one with nice Teka wares.

And the rest of the furniture have to go too... so, that's another RM15k to spend on new stuffs but I won't record these as one would need new furnitures too if purchasing a brand new modern unit.

So, the total cost of acquisition and refurbishing is still well below RM800k, the cost one would have to pay to acquire a similar sized brand new unit at Mutiara Residency or 633 Residency... That's your control but what you cannot control is the common areas....

While the pictures seems spectacular from afar... and the list of facilities seems standard, the condition is not so standard...

A closer look at the details reveal blocked toilets...

rotting doors...

smelly gym...

but things are certainly functioning... like this in-house barber

There appears to be effort to spruce up the place. The walls seems like they're recently painted so there might be some hope... but I think it will be tough at this price....