Experience in Owning a Private Property

Hi Everyone!

In today's blog I will be talking about my personal experience in Owning a Private property

Owning a property in Singapore is expensive but it is necessary be it a HDB or private property because you will need a home to stay in. So come at times you will be facing a decision when it comes to purchase a property.

I have been through lots of question from my family, friends and online commenters that why I go for private property instead of HDB. Certainly HDB will be better for the start because it is cheaper and have tons of grants that you can apply for. Of course the resale value might be higher if you manage to BTO a superb location.

So why? The reason is because my wife already had a condo before we got married. So with this, it leads us to three options, HDB resale, private property resale and private property launch.

For first option, if we go for HDB resale, we will not be able to get any grant due to possession of private property and we have to dispose the private property within 6 months after purchase. During that time we are unsure whether if we can sell away the property and it will be a gamble as the market is not that good at that point of time. So we skip this option.

Second option, we tried to research and find out the possible price for a resale condo, but the price are quite steep during the time when we first searching for private property. The reason is because we will need to fork out around 24% (including lawyer fee and other miscellaneous fees) in order to make the purchase. At that point of time I don't have that huge amount of savings yet.

Then we go for the third option, purchase a private property at sales launch (meaning brand new condo). We though it will be cheaper like high Park residence but in actual fact, it wasn't that case. It was very expensive and the psf was way too high. Don't really justify our money so we look around and wait for bukot batok condo launch. And yes, finally it launch but the price was also way too high. At that time we are still aiming for 600+ square feet condo as it still within our budget but sad to say we didn't get to purchase it cause it is due to balloting. Totally no luck.

So we look around for both sales launch and resale and finally have found somewhere but and cheap but of course if you have these two, you will need to sacrifice one parameter which is the location. So we bought that place and pay the necessary for the purchase.

Understand that many would think that this is it! The payment is done and everything will go well. Well that is not true. Must plan well before you purchase property especially private property. Cause other than the common monthly installments that you have to pay (similar to HDB), you will need to pay maintenance fee as well. That will amount to around $250 to $500 per month, depending on which condo you stay. Also the maintenance fee also depending on the size of your unit. For example, the maintenance fee for 1 bedroom will be lower than the maintenance fee for 3 bedroom within the same project.

Of course the good point is that you have all the facilities free (except booking of function room and etc. That you might need to pay a small fee. But still better than renting a place outside as renting a place outside for function event can cost a bomb. So overall still worth it.

That's all for the post of you need me to clarify or share some more information about .do let me know