SINGAPORE/JOHOR – Drive for an hour past Tuas Checkpoint, beyond the hilly golf resorts and the yawping theme parks, across humid hectares of plantation and pineapple farms, and you will arrive at an unvarying row of concrete Lego bricks, each the size of a bedroom.

In that same hour, thes e slabs of precast rooms are lifted and loaded onto traile rs. They the n leave Aurum Precast factory in Johor’s Pekan Nanas – meaning “pineapple town” – and snake past the Second Link to a Singapore construction site. There, they join other identical slabs, stacked atop one another to make the next glitzy condominium project.