TAP is a co-living brand that offers its tenants, or members, a space not just to live in, but also to work and play in. Lim emphasises that within the four walls of any of the brand’s properties, members from diverse backgrounds live in a single space, and the company offers programmes and activities to bring everyone together and forge meaningful friendships.
The memory of attending assemblies stayed with Lim through university and into a career he never planned to have. At 21, he took on a real estate job to fund his studies, with the intention of joining the civil service later. Instead, he became a director at Knight Frank by the age of 29 and then spent six years at Oxley Holdings.
In 2019, a single test case turned into a mission. A landlord with an inner-city terrace struggled to rent the property. Lim decided to renovate the space and make it attractive enough that people would want to rent it. His idea was to divide the rooms into six and rent them out individually, rather than finding a single tenant for the entire space.
“Within a week, all six rooms were leased,” recalls Lim. The tenants came from different places, including Hong Kong and Indonesia, and worked in various industries, such as banking and technology. However, they were all young expat professionals. This sparked Lim’s inspiration to set up TAP.
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Aside from simply leasing out rooms and branding the property as “co-living”, Lim was adamant in also including some community-building activities. This started small, as this was before the company had an app or a budget: Lim placed a tray of kaya toast in the common area of that first house.
“Breakfast is on the house,” he told the six strangers living there, trusting food to do the introductions, as the tenants gathered in the dining area to enjoy this quintessential local delicacy. It worked. As they learned a little more about Singapore’s food culture, they also gained a deeper understanding of one another.
Lim began to expand this concept of “assemblies” to more properties. During festive seasons, such as Christmas, he hosted a potluck session for the tenants — who were living in Singapore away from their families — to give them a sense of community. “Food naturally brings people together,” he says, emphasising that the co-living properties have a large focus on community building that eventually attracts expats and foreign students.
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From parade square to a “living sector of choice”
Six years on, Lim says that TAP has built up a position for itself as “a living sector of choice”. The brand’s offerings span across co-living, student accommodation, healthcare lodging and boutique hotels. The offerings are also available across various types of properties, including purpose-built spaces, shophouses, landed houses, individual units, and hotels. The company’s hotel brand is Social and it has just launched its latest Social property at Mayo Street, with Rochor and Bugis MRT stations just a minutes’ stroll away.
TAP also recently won a Singapore Land Authority (SLA) tender for what Lim calls “Singapore’s first inter-generational living site”. Located on Henderson Road, Commune@Henderson is a co-living property featuring a four-story block with 292 beds across 102 rooms, complemented by a separate building dedicated to communal facilities. The purposeful design segregates living spaces, with seniors residing on the first level in wheelchair-accessible, elder-friendly rooms, while younger residents reside on levels 2 to 4.
By combining all the properties, TAP now has nearly 4,000 keys across 140 locations in Singapore, serving different budgets without losing members to the broader market. The current operating picture is tight, with TAP’s serviced apartment-type inventory at 93% to 94% occupancy, reflecting demand from international students and expats.
Lim’s rough market sense is that even combined, today’s operators do not meet the whole pool of potential tenants. As traditional rentals approach co-living rates, the convenience premium becomes easier to justify for many. Aside from offering a shorter and more flexible lease compared to simply renting a room, Lim shares that co-living properties come fully furnished and with all amenities readily available to the member.
“Most importantly, the members move in and the Wi-Fi is ready [with utilities included], so they don’t have to source for telcos or to find out how to pay these bills,” explains Lim, adding that these small conveniences give assurance to those who are new to Singapore.
“You stay here, you participate in my community, and you could meet new people. So I think these are the little details that create comfort,” he adds.
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Members typically stay for six to nine months. Approximately 95% are foreigners, and three-quarters are under the age of 34. Many are in Singapore for the first time, doing undergraduate or postgraduate programmes or in their first job after leaving home. The TAP team leans heavily into programming to help new arrivals find their footing.
Across all of the properties, events run every two to three weeks, from basketball to kombucha workshops. The community calendar is as much a product as the accommodation itself, building “stickiness” that supports retention and word of mouth.
With the diverse range of room types available throughout Singapore, Lim’s concept for TAP is designed to allow its members to “graduate from space to space”, providing them with the convenience and flexibility to upgrade or downgrade within the community according to their budget or needs.
The operating model has evolved to make that breadth possible. TAP began as an asset-light manager. It still prefers that, but now takes 10% to 20% minority stakes in certain assets it also operates. That aligns incentives with landlords and allows TAP to benefit from capital upside on exit without building a large loan book. Lim expects to continue doing this over the next two to three years while scaling up key metrics across formats.
Running 140 addresses poses classic cost and coordination problems. Early on, TAP struggled with maintenance, housekeeping and the inefficiencies of many small buildings. The team decided to build, not buy, the software around operations. “We coded everything from scratch,” says Lim. An in-house CRM and member app now channel repair tickets, housekeeping dispatches and cross-team tasks, which in turn allows the company to stay unusually lean “even though our room count is much bigger” than smaller rivals, says Lim, who runs his company with a team of just 38, inclusive of front desk staff. Housekeeping is outsourced.
He emphasises a loyalty layer in the app that offers promotions and discounts to about 40 partner merchants, spanning from gyms to salons and restaurants. The goal is to add value continually, so members hesitate to switch, even if a new operator offers a small discount. In Lim’s view, buildings age, but “timeless” experience comes from programming, benefits and service cadence.
Eugene Lim, founder and CEO of The Assembly Place, was adamant in including community- building activities at his co-living properties
The key to growing keys
Singapore’s co-living scene is still young, yet increasingly demanding. In 2019, Lim argues, the “barrier to entry” was low. By 2025, the market will have “reached a certain level of maturity”. Young renters research thoroughly, expect certain standards and value their options. He believes TAP is one of the top three preferred operators for those set on co-living.
Regulation is clearer today than it was in 2019, which helps with planning. Lim points to URA’s consistent definition of the co-living sector and the long-standing minimum-stay rules in public housing. He also notes that some government tender documents now explicitly welcome co-living concepts, a signal of growing acceptance as the market matures.
Capital has followed the execution. In November 2021, TAP raised $5.55 million in seed funding led by Oxley’s deputy CEO Eric Low, alongside investors well known in the local property scene, including Kemmy Tan of former CEO M+S; Ismail Gafoor, executive chairman of PropNex; Wendy Tang, former group managing director of Knight Frank; Bruce Lye and Ken Low, managing partners at SRI; Shaun Poh, executive director of Cushman & Wakefield; Dennis Goh of Lyte Ventures, better known as the founder of hungrygowhere.com; and Sean Tan of Technovator International and True Group.
Lim’s pitch to backers was straightforward — keep the core asset-light, prove unit economics, then scale through management contracts with selective minority co-investment.
Moving forward, Lim has big growth plans. He has set a goal to reach 10,000 keys by 2030, which implies approximately 1,500 new keys every year from now. He believes it is achievable because growth now comes from multiple products, including student housing, healthcare accommodation, serviced apartments and hotels, alongside the core of co-living. The company started with six rooms in 2019 and now has nearly 4,000 keys, which, Lim says, demonstrates its capacity to continue adding without compromising quality.
On financing, Lim is pragmatic. “We are very open to different kinds of fundraising models, whether through the private or the public market. We are not discounting any fundraising opportunity,” he says. The immediate focus is to scale the business “over the next three years”, with an eventual and possible listing on the Singapore Exchange.
As it stands, the market is becoming more aware and accepting of the co-living business model. And if it is any indication, that one tray of kaya toast in Lim’s first co-living property is proof that a single space, when designed for assembly, with the help of some food, can bring strangers together to become neighbours.
