Property searching is often a stressful journey whether one is searching for their dream home or as an investor who is looking for a property that brings them decent rental yield for passive income or capital gains. With the opportunities to serve various buyers from all walks of life, we get to experience the same anxiety and anxiousness together with our clients as we guide them through every process.
We have met clients who are focusing on just rental play, or parents who specifically have a project to be near a primary school, and also clients who purchase a unit for their own stay with emotional appeal being the biggest determining factor for them. Going through these experiences allow us to understand more in depth of each individual’s goals and allow us to gain insightful experiences on how to assist our clients with different objectives.
Especially at this period when interest rates and property prices are on an upward trend, buyers are shelving the idea of purchasing a home now and hoping the prices to plateau to enter the market. Now, the question is – should we time the market?
Based on our team’s findings, even with 5 rounds of rate hike cycles in the past, home prices in Singapore are still on the rise. This phenomenon may be due to the fact that buyers were taking action with the low interest rates advantage, thus there’s a surge in price in every hike cycle. The only time that the prices dipped was during the Asian Financial Crisis. In summary, it would be great not to time the market and get into the investment of your new property before the interest rate reaches its peak.
The First Meet Up
In mid-2022, we met a buyer who reached out to us and our team speedily assisted in arranging for a buyer consultation. During this process, we got to understand that the buyers were pretty firm on purchasing a 2-bedder and the district which they want to reside in. As they prefer to stay in D12/D20 due to the location for accessibility, they also understood the price range would be on the higher side and would compromise with the size of the property. They also have an allocated budget based on their IPA and cash savings. Though they came well-prepared, we would always offer our assistance to help our clients with their financial calculations and timeline planning during the consultation. This is to ensure that they have all the right information for a smooth transition and avoid any unnecessary cost implications along the way through our purchasing journey.
At this point of the consultation, our buyers, who are Singapore Permanent Residents (PR), realised they had missed out on the Additional Buyer Stamp Duty Fees – which is 5% of the purchase or valuation price (whichever is higher).
With this new information, our buyers were able to factor in the additional cost they had missed and realign their budget and expectations for the new property.
The Research/Analysis/Shortlisting
Though our buyers are Singapore PR, they understood the importance of getting a property within a 1km radius of primary schools for their kids in the future and being one of the key appeal factors for future buyers. This is also one of the main focus points they would like to fulfil during their house hunting journey. Besides the primary school criteria, our team would fulfil our due diligence to assist our buyers in analysing if a certain project would retain its value and have good probability of capital appreciation over time with our proprietary tool – PLB’s MOAT Analysis.
In PLB’s MOAT Analysis, we identified 10 factors contributing to property value defense over time. The objective of the analysis is to find out how likely a property is to retain its value and appreciate over time. The 10 factors that we identified are correlated to the price performance of properties and help to provide an indication of the desirability of the property in the eyes of future buyers.
Below are the 2 project comparisons for our clients’ preferred locale in D12 and D20. For which, Trevista is an exceptional project with a score of 80%, hitting 5 out of 10 factors with full scores. Hence, with these strong appeals, we can understand why the owners in this project are holding on to their properties or looking for a great price to exit.
Though Trevista hits a higher score than Thomson Three, it doesn’t mean purchasing a unit in Trevista is the better way to go. There are other emotional considerations to factor in – The interior and layout of the unit, the view you get from the unit or even the available level.
In summary, we are here to assist you in the research and analysis portion that you might not have the time and resources for. This will give you a better understanding of how the project is performing and will allow you to make a more informed decision.
The Viewings and Fine Tuning
After the research and narrowing down the projects suitable for our clients, we finally get to see the real deal. Viewing units is the most exciting part of the journey as you get to visit the unit, immerse yourself in the property and visualise living in it. This is also the time when our buyers will get to understand what they really prefer in terms of the floor plan layout, stack facing, floor level they like, and even the noise level from the surroundings.
Through these viewings, our buyers realised that in order to enjoy the convenience of being near an MRT, the unit has to absorb a little track noise. On the flip side, to enjoy tranquillity, buyers will likely have to give up the convenience to the amenities around them. They have also realised that their initial preference for a higher level doesn’t seem to be a huge factor anymore.
With these experiences, both our team and buyers are able to be aligned and fine-tune the search to find the most suitable unit.
For our buyers, after their physical viewings in Trevista and Thomson Three, they came to realise that they would prefer a bigger space and understood the limited supply of properties available in the market. After a thorough discussion, given their main focus is to find a home that is spacious enough to start a family while staying within their budget, they are open to exploring the OCR area with a 3-bedder.
The One Unit
At current, Gabriel and Angela are in the midst of continuing to assist our buyers’ property search. It will not be surprising if they find the right home for their clients in good time with Gabriel’s high expertise in serving his clients, and Angela, who believes in a technical approach with a data analysis approach over hearsay and intuition (Fun Fact: Gabriel, our Listing Manager holds the title of having served the most buyers).
We are also very glad and thankful that our buyers are able to streamline their wants and needs with the research and analysis we have value-added to them. Hopefully, our buyers will be able to finally come across The One Unit in the OCR! Best of luck! If you are also looking for The One, feel free to contact us!
