Get used to less stress
Thanks to transparency of property market here, buying & selling are not as daunting as before
COMMENTARY
The end of the year is a great time to reflect and take stock of your life.
Are you heading in the right direction? What are your goals for next year? Is it time for a change? A new car? A new job? A new home?
If 2015 is like 2014, there will be about 6,000 sales and rental property transactions per month. This means tremendous change for a large number of households each month.
The parties in these transactions will go through the arduous task of buying and selling homes, then packing up and moving house.
This change can be exciting, but it can be stressful too.
If you are considering a new home next year, you will move through four daunting phases: Selecting a home, negotiating a price, closing the deal (that is, the paperwork) and physically moving your household.
The good news is that technology is making it much easier to find the right home at the right price in 2015.
There are several property portals here that allow you to browse and shortlist homes using mobile technology.
Meanwhile, there has never been more pricing information available than there is today. The Housing Board (HDB) and the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) provide raw transaction data to the public.
SRX Property processes this raw data from HDB, URA and over 30 other public and private sources to make the data relevant, timely and easy-to-use for consumers and real estate agents.
TRANSPARENT
Recently, the URA announced it would help make the property market even more transparent by disclosing the net prices of individual units sold by developers.
This will bring more clarity to the property market, which is arguably already the most transparent property market in the world.
What this means to buyers and sellers next year is less stress when it comes to finding the right home at the right price.
The Singapore property market is approaching the same type of transparency that you see in the stock market or even the supermarket.
In the past, it was difficult to establish the price of a home because there was not enough pricing information available to the public.
Things have changed.
Now, when you go to the property market, you and the seller start the negotiation with SRX Property's X-Value, which is an instantaneous computer-generated appraisal of the market value of every non-landed flat in Singapore.
People are using the X-Value to calculate over 50,000 home values each month.
The X-Value is based on a strict methodology that compares the unit you're interested in with similar homes that have been recently transacted. It serves as an unbiased starting point for the negotiation.
If the seller wants more than the X-Value, he needs to justify the price premium and get the buyer to agree with him. Otherwise, the deal falls apart.
The combination of more available information and the technology that processes that information means more pricing transparency. This helps take away the stress and frees you up to focus on your other goals for the new year.
Sam Baker is co-founder of SRX, an information exchange formed by leading real estate agencies in Singapore to disseminate market pricing information and facilitate property listings and transactions. To calculate a property's X-Value, visit SRX.com.sg or check out the X-Value calculator on The New Paper website at tnp.sg/news
The good news is that technology is making it much easier to find the right home at the right price in 2015.
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