Property Malaysia

This project was recently launched at their show unit in neighbouring Damansara Intan. Tropicana City is nothing to do with the well known Tropicana Golf and Country Resort, although both are by the same developer Dijaya.

Tropicana City is a shopping centre that has been left incomplete since the piling works for the past few years, most PJ residents would be familiar with the large tract of land left excavated with the pilecap rebar sticking out, at the corner of SS2, Damansara Kim, Damansara Jaya and Damansara Utama.

In the intervening years, Dijaya concentrated on other projects like the aforementioned Tropicana Golf & Country Resort, Damansara Indah Resort Homes, Casa Indah, Damansara Intan e-Business Park (incorporating the exclusive Casa Suites) and Casa Damansara 1 & 2 (apparently Casa 3 is launching soon).

Now, Dijaya are turning their attention to recommencing the Tropicana City project. What they have here is a large 4-storey shopping centre (with Carrefour apparently signed on as the anchor tenant), and there will be a block of 24-storey serviced apartment. In future there are plans to have an office tower, too. The serviced apartment is christened The Tropics Designer Suites.

Tropicana City is well situated, right at the important junction between Sprint Highway and the LDP. It’s a centralized location for the affluent areas of Damansara Utama, Taman Tun, Section 17 and SS2. In SS2 itself, many citizens have always noted that there isn’t a landmark hypermarket to serve the people’s shopping needs all these years, just like what Carrefour (SS16) and Giant is to Subang Jaya. The relatively new Tesco in Mutiara Damansara is a little too far and can hardly be said to have an impact to SS2. The Giant in the Atria doesn’t count.

So with Tropicana City, a largely untapped retail market is promising, and also the convenient living for young, urban, mobile people looking for a place to live that provides lots of ready facilities at their doorstep, and isn’t too far for them to travel to work in the city. This area has largely seen a increase in newly launched condos to address this pressing need, evidently from the launches of Ken I, II and III, and the aforementioned Casa Damansara 1 and 2. But with the Tropicana City shopping centre, The Tropics offered something more that the others cannot match, i.e. the convenience of the mall. But as a trade-off, the condo is a serviced apartment, i.e. on commercial title. But as most folks tell you, you can’t have it all, so something’s got to give.

To capitalize on the location, the developer has 7 entry points and 6 exit points into the mall, located on all the surrounding roads, including the construction of a new flyover to Jalan Damansara Lama (according to them, costing RM15million), which will make travel to and from Kota Damansara and TTDI a breeze. You can see the impressive network in the diagram below.

There are actually 2 towers here, linked together, forming a symmetrical ‘V’ shape. There are 601 units here, in 24 levels of apartments, with a common podium of facilities at the rooftop of the mall, as with most developments similar to this. Each tower has a max of 14 units per floor, giving a total of 28. In terms of the view, since there is only two sides to the façade, they’ve named it Damansara View or Pool View.

There are 2 types of units – typical units and loft units. The typical units are single floor units ranging from a small 625sq.ft. to 730sq.ft. There’s not much to talk about on these units, they’re small, with only 2 bedrooms. Some types are rectangular in shape, while some have some portions of the house angled at 45 degrees, which is a little impractical.

The loft units are the same as the typical units, with the additional of half a floor of open room looking down onto the lower floor, similar to the unit found in Casa Suites. Here it’s either 2+1 rooms or 2+2. Sizes are from 1,040sq.ft to 1,176sq.ft. We don’t particularly like the open master bedroom concept, there’s no privacy at all, unless you stay alone, which defeats the purpose of providing more than 1 room. The loft units come with full glass windows giving a good view of the outside, depending on which view you have. Units are also rectangular or angled. If you ask us, we’d choose the rectangular ones any day.

They’ve managed to pack considerable facilities for residents here, notably the security (we were quite impressed with the system they used for Casa Damansara 1), a large 3-in-1 swimming pool, sports facilities, gym, sauna & steam room, concierge services, and shops especially for the residents.

Regular readers would know that we usually don’t fancy serviced apartments, especially ones above shopping malls (e.g. K Residence, The Axis Residences and Beverly Tower). Recently there has been quite a number of these launched all over Klang Valley, probably attesting to the broadening of the market. In terms of location, this has a huge plus factor, so for those who don’t mind the concept of serviced apartment, this would be a good choice. But the nearest LRT station is quite some distance away, so you should be expected to have your own transport. The units are tailored more towards single or dual occupancy, or couples at the most. As with Ken 2, we’d expect that this place would attract investors looking to rent out to yuppies, or parents buying a unit for their children’s stay with an eye to rent out or sell later.

Good location, but we don’t like the unit layout. Traffic may be a problem at peak hours when the mall opens. At the moment, it is already quite susceptible to horrendous jams.

Units aren’t cheap, averaging from RM300psf. to RM340psf, but a fair reflection of the above factors. Also, most project with high cost of infrastructure, (in this case the RM15million flyover and the holding cost of the land over the past few years), the cost is usually borne by the buyers, even if they don’t know it. But in this case, it would be less significant in the sense that it is spread between the tenants of Tropics, the office tower renters and the retailers in the mall.