Are you buying property near the peak?
Read an article, What total debt servicing ratio meant to kill, commenting on the new property measures by the government recently to cool down the market and make sure that individuals do not over commit to property on Yahoo! news recently.
From there, went to read the author’s blog posts and found it illuminating as it seems that the author is still young but has already bought four properties. In her posts, one can draw the conclusion that she thinks that the property market is near its peak and is poised to go down soon.
Her blog posts about property is worth reading and gives the reader a lot of thinking to do about what her key thoughts about the property market.
I had been selling my shares and unit trusts furiously over the past couple of weeks. Think the stocks that my wife and me have is down to about 6 or 7 stocks that is making money and we have closed some of the loss making counters with those that have profits. This is in preparation for buying a condominium (that’s a condo by the way).
My good friend bought his condo for less than half a million at $440,000 nine years ago which is worth at least a million now I think. With the prices of property reaching all time high, this could be the peak of the market like 1996 was for some of those who bought property at the time.
My wife and I have been thinking of getting a condo and raising money for the purchase. There are two that we have been looking at which we may want to consider buying.
However, I’ve been doing the calculations and we have an upper limit to what we will consider and also be comfortably be able to pay off the housing loan. Plus have enough reserves to be on target to retire and continue with our investments. No need and no urge to keep up with the Jones if it is out of budget.
Have been kept up to date with all the machinations that is happening in US with the Federal Reserve that is thinking of taking away their money printing machine (what is termed as the bond buying/quantitative easing) and putting it away sometime next year. That will mean interest rates will increase which will translate to falling property prices in Singapore as we are linked very much to it.
While the prices of condo have increased in the years, inflation has also kept up so we should also accept that the property prices will have increased.
If the prices of the two condos that are being launched are beyond our budgeted price for the size that we are looking for, we are prepared to walk away and not buy.
After all, we are living in a pretty good location near to Serangoon NEX within 5 minutes of the MRT here with two MRT lines (NEL and Circle line) plus the fact that if we moved, it will to be a property with a smaller area.
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Are you also thinking of buying property or if you are a property agent, are you advising your clients to buy or not to buy?
February 14, 2016 at 3:25 PM
It's now 2016 and we have the benefit of hindsight. Turns out this post was on the dot. The property market has declined since the post and is now pretty down compared to 2013.
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