Tag: Guest post

What is really happening in the Singapore property market, as told by the Heat Map

Posted on by Centauri78

Over the last 4 weeks since we restarted The Straits Times Property News Heat Map, news flow has actually been pretty slow. With 53 articles talking about the property market in 4 weeks, that’s an average of 13.25 articles per week or 1.89 articles per day. In Season 1 (9 Sep 12 – 19 Jan 13), there were 273 articles in 19 weeks, or 14.37 articles per week, or 2.05 articles per day on average.

 Week of  Negative  Neutral  Positive  Total
13/5/13  1  6 3 10
20/5/13  2 6  3 11
27/5/13  2  13  5 20
3/6/13  2 8 2 12

The proportion of articles that were positive, neutral or negative is also instructive. We had 7 negative (13%), 33 neutral (62%) and 13 positive (25%) articles in the last 4 weeks. In Season 1, we had 10% negative, 49% neutral and 40% positive. Continue reading “What is really happening in the Singapore property market, as told by the Heat Map” →

How much should you pay? … The sequel…

Posted on by Centauri78

A friend of mine (let’s call her Rabbita) thinks that the formula from my previous post is too complicated and difficult to implement, and I agree to a certain extent. After all, like I said, it’s really subjective how much value you put into each item on the list. For example, a nearby MRT is usually a plus, but a person who goes everywhere by car might not care if there’s an MRT station near the place, or he might even think that it’s a nuisance.

Rabbita’s suggested method is to set a budget first, and make sure the price plus renovation costs fit your budget. It’s intuitive and makes budgeting sense. Most people will probably do that if they plan to buy for their own stay. After all, buying a home is usually an emotional thing and some things just can’t be quantified. Continue reading “How much should you pay? … The sequel…” →

How much should you pay?

Posted on by Centauri78

How do you know how much to pay for a piece of property? Do you have a method, or do you go by your gut? Oftentimes, it’s not as simple as finding out the psf data of deals done in the same project or in neighbouring projects. From unit to unit, from project to project, and area to area, there can be big differences in terms of facing, view, facilities, fittings etc. To make things worse, a lot of these criteria are subjective. So how do you determine how much is a fair price?

Here’s the step-by-step of how I generally do it:

1. First determine what is your base price. Basically the question to ask here is this: if I were to buy a property in this general area, how much would I pay per square foot? Alternatively, if you don’t really have an answer to that question, you can take a sampling of the psf prices of similar units in the same area. Doing this will help you establish a benchmark for the subsequent step.
Continue reading “How much should you pay?” →