Singapore Considers Cooling Down The Real Estate Market

The local economy began to become more favorable, Singapore real estate market finally showed signs of life again. Activities in the market has increased significantly, and economists are busy painting rosy picture on real estate transactions in the coming months. But beneath all the noise and optimism, Singapore government announced in November 2009 and calibrated that it intends to take measures to prevent the emergence of the real estate market.

Perhaps the memory of the sudden boom and bust in the mid nineties is still fresh in the administration’s mind. And this time round, the government is more determined to prevent such a sharp uptake and potentially followed by equally quick reversal of the market.

The Singapore government has quite a few options at their disposal and they are land supply strategy, credit tightening and taxation policies. We will go over each of these in more details.

Land Supply Decision – This could be the most effective tool to counter the red hot demand of properties of all types in Singapore. As the government cut down on the release of land for new development, this is certainly going to slow down the supply for new projects being launched to the market, thus putting a curb on the unreasonable property speculation.

Financing – Recently there have been speculations in the market that government may review the guidelines for financial facilities such as private housing loan.Market players and speculators would be hard hit if this amount is brought back to 80 percent of purchase price.Currently the maximum loan amount a lender can approve to a qualified private house buyer is 90 percent.

Taxation Policies – As the Government of the options for action in the housing market, this feature is probably somewhere in the plan. The tax on capital income has always been a convenient tool in the past in the fight against the excessive exploitation of living in Singapore. And when it relaunched, this would certainly affect the market in a big way.

Raise Property Tax – In general those owner-occupiers in Singapore currently pay half of this amount. These folks may be subjected to a higher tax than the current 10 percent.It could also be a focused approach targeting property investors and speculators.

Double Stamp Duty – Again this could be effective to slow down the market speculators as a stamp duty would be imposed whenever he chooses to buy or sell a piece of property.

However it is still early days to tell if the government would exercise its option as the market is still directionless at the moment. So there you have it, a quick list of possible measures to fight the potentially overheated property market.

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