My Journey Of Purchasing My First Property [Part 1]

Hi Everyone!

Starting from this post, I will share with you on my experience on purchasing my first property which is a 2 bedroom condo at the north area.

For this part, I will share with you on the preparation work before eyeing on the first property and also the must know stuff before you purchase a property.

1) Are you purchasing for your own stay or for investing. Many may asked why is this question so important, afterall it's still the same. Well yea, after all the property that you purchase, you can either stay or rent it out. But, when it comes to financial terms, you might be doing it wrong.

Why do I say that? Because we need to know that the property that you stay in might not be an asset (which I think it's true). The reason is because the property that you stay in, is most likely a liability because you will need to pay for the possible expenses as well as you will need a place to stay so you can't really sell that property unless you downgrade. In other words, do think of it as paying for your rent to stay.

So, why is there a difference in deciding whether to stay or rent? Not sure if you thought of it this way but personally i will have different criteria for purchasing property for own stay and investing. For me buying for own stay, I will look out for bigger space, psf not so expensive and then considering location and amenities. If I am looking for investing, I will go for location first before the size of the property.

The reason why I think this way is because having a bigger space is crucial for me and my Wife is because we will be expecting to have children in few years time thus we would need bigger space so that it won't be so cramp. So bigger space is very important to me if I am living in it. On the other hand, for investing, location, location and location. Without that you might/will not be able to get a good rental yield.

To sum up for Point one, my criteria for purchasing my property is size, mid to Low price and monthly installment is affordable.

2) New property or resale?

Of course new property will definitely be better as everything is brand new and not much renovation is required, new is good for me:) so we start our property hunting 2 years back( from 2015 till 2017). Initially we wanted to check the property market and what are the layout of the condos (including the various design amenities and etc) to understand the condo facilities and the cost as well.

Due to the lack of fundings we were not able to purchase any property back then even when highpark residence was launch at the very affordable price (so no choice have to skip that)

Up till this year where I have hit my target of 160k and more, which enable me to start looking for property with the intent to purchase. Back in 2016, my Wife and I already looking out for condo at Bukit Batok (le quest) which initially we thought that it will be affordable after all not much amenities around that area and it's not near mrt. Which makes us thought that the psf will be lower like around 1k psf. But we turn out to be wrong because the indicative price for 2 bedroom is around $1158 and when the actual sales it went up to $1200++. So which means a 2 bedroom with the size of 598sf would cost around $800k++.

The size is small and psf is high which isn't what we looking for. Of course we still went through the balloting process and we didn't purchase it. We were devastated during that moment but we didn't give up, instead of looking at the new property, we change our direction to look for resale property, those that Just completed 2, 3 years ago.

We spotted quite a number of units in the north east area like Punggol, Sengkang and etc. But the location is too far from our workplace. So although the price is attractive but the Travelling time really not worth it unless we change job. So our search continues until we found the one with 850 sf with the psf below 1k and is quite near to our workplace. The price is around the same as le quest 2 bedroom but the size is bigger, bigger by 252sf. To me it's totally worth it.

So this is my part one of my sharing, do look out for part two as I will share with you regarding the finances of purchasing a property.

Thank you :)