Backlogs 02 - Resale House Hunt

June 2007 - July 2007

For this purpose, being the kiasu Singaporeans that we are, we actually engaged two housing agents to help us in our house hunt.

Agent K
This was one based on a friend's recommendation who had utilised his services earlier and got a pretty good location and price for his new place just a couple of months earlier.

Agent L
A friend back from Army Days, he'll be more approachable. Since he's in the business of house transactions, we engaged him as well.

Criteria for House
Ideally, it would be good that our new place be near our parents and amenities. Amenities meaning not too far from MRT stations and places where food can be found (forseeing that we would have little time or patience for cooking).

Giving the agents our budgets and criteria, we have actually scouted for places near Jurong, Toh Guan, even up to forsaken Teban Gardens. Agent K brought us to these places. His honest advice was that the resale housing market was heating up and sellers are looking for quick gains in asking for high cash-over-valuation (COV) prices. I only blame the enbloc sales and the media limelight in the recent news that bolstered sellers' expectations. Every week or so we would read in the papers about new private AND public houses selling for record prices. Records being broken every few weeks or so..
His take on this was: for a young couple like us, with not that much cash in hand -- try to buy a new unit directly from the HDB.

Indeed, the units he has brought us to see, in our opinion, were not in very good condition, or locations, and had high asking prices.

Just to orientate you, my current place is in Jurong, while hulk stays in Bishan.




Unfortunately, Agent L could fare no better. We even went up to Sengkang area to take a look, and even then, sellers were asking for 15 - 20k COV. Seeing that we have to budget for renovations, wedding, furnishings etc etc.. This is not a favourable scenario. Here's a photo of one of these Sengkang units:



It's tall and windy with a seaview, but just beside an expressway (TPE). It's noisy noisy noisy!