HDB Revises Flat Application Rules (part III of III)

Continuing parts I and II,

Against the hope that someone important reads these posts, let me put the constructive comments before all the vitriol below.

Who are those "with urgent housing needs" who HDB should be selling flats to? They are the couples married or getting married, planning to have children in less than five years. When you have thousands of such couples applying for flats, and none of them wanted any one of the 30% of flats available in a particular BTO, what does that tell you? It tells me that for some reason, those flats are not suitable. Too expensive, too far away, too small, etc.

Yes, they could compromise to have less than ideal flats, so by definition they are picky. But if you choose to define them as picky, and try to shoehorn them into your plans rather than catering to their needs, then you're going to get delayed marriages, delayed parenthood, less children than they might otherwise have had.

My suggestion is this : 70% of the Coral Spring flats were sold. 30% could find no buyers at the price. I'm sure it was no accident that this 30% were not selected. They must be overpriced, in the sense that all the remaining homeowners rejected them. Can they be priced lower? If the price is already "unreasonably" low, then these flats must be worth less than they cost to built. Should they not be built? If they must be built (maybe they're all the low floors, or all the afternoon sun units), then the prices of the entire block should reflect the losses that would be made on the low-value units. And if the HDB overestimated the value of those units - then like private sector organisations, it should decide if it's better to discount these units or hang on to them and absorb the loss.

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Well those flats are subsidised, they're being built to help (more unfortunate) Singaporeans "with urgent housing needs". HDB should be allowed to tweak their rules anyway they want - you ungrateful twats! Right?

Well - point 1 - urgent housing needs. I'd previously browsed articles about people urgently seeking rentals. Can't easily find them again, but Google popped up at least one -

Every time they ask HDB about their rental, everyone says the same thing -
to wait. It has been almost two years now and there is still no news. I am
really sad to see them this way

Right...
Well, enough character assassination. Think about it - urgent housing needs. The implication is that the picky ones are getting in the way of those with "urgent housing needs" - a phrase which conjures up visions of people living on the street, who could get a home now that the picky ones are being purged. But if your BTO is 30% under-sold, there's nobody with urgent housing needs, at least not urgent enough to buy what you're trying to sell them. It's a silly way to justify the policy, to disguise it as a resource prioritization issue. What HDB is trying to do is to incentivise homeseekers to buy what HDB wants built, rather than what the homeseekers are looking for. The thinking might go something like this:

"Ooh. Unsold flats. Why don't they want to stay at these places? If enough people moved into these remote locales in these beautiful communities we have planned, then the demand for services would bring services to these communities and everyone would benefit! These silly people, so picky! They're spoiling our system! Making us look bad too, first so many applicants, makes it look like we didn't build enough. Then so many empty flats, as if what we offered is so unattractive! These picky people! How do I make them stop applying and then not buying flats?"

I'm sorry - in my idealized view of government, I would have thought that the approach should have been to find out why the BTOs were falling short of those homeseeker's expectations.

Or maybe they've asked already, and discovered that these picky people are just unrealistic buggers who expect cheap and good, and their expectations are unrealistic. You'll never meet their needs so get them out of the way. Well, if that's the case - then the implication is that the unsold flats ARE worth their price. Obviously all the people applying for HDB flats are too stupid to see that the flats are good bargains!

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HDB revises flat application rules (part II of III)

Continuing the previous post,

Weren't the BTOs supposed to ensure that supply did not outstrip demand (and saddle HDB with unsold homes) (and on the side, cause a fall in housing prices that would anger existing home owners - hmm I wonder which is more important)?

The recent Coral Spring project, for instance, saw about 30% of flats not taken
up even after all applicants had been invited to book a flat.

So a question to self - if BTOs are 70% sold as reported there, then does it reflect that supply is outstripping demand? And how does that tally with 1000+ people still looking for flats and applying to the new BTO projects Compassvale Pearl and Punggol Sapphire?

It tallies. It tells me that the BTOs as HDB is building them is not meeting the needs of that bunch of people who rejected the flats and are still out there shopping. Rather than questioning the pickiness of the homeseekers, maybe the HDB should be asking questions like
"What are they looking for? Why are they so picky? Which 30% of the flats are not being sold? Maybe it's the low floors? Maybe it's the bigger flats? The smaller ones? Would it sell if we priced it lower? Would it sell if we made them bigger?"

If you tell me that the flats were eventually taken up after many applicants rejected them, sure, I'll agree that maybe those guys in front were picky, and the guys later got their homes in the end - after a longer wait then necessary. But when nobody wants the flats at all - maybe those guys aren't being picky. Maybe those flats really are lemons. I wouldn't know, I didn't apply - but if I had to guess from the available info I'd say, hell yes those flats must have been bad.

HDB Revises Flat Application Rules (part I of III)

Recent launches of Build-to-Order flats have seen an overwhelming number of applications, especially those in mature estates, leading to speculation that there is a shortage of new flats. But HDB said, on the contrary, the bulk of applicants often do not end up making a purchase.

Right. Let's see.
1) The policy change targets first-time applicants.
2) As of my writing this post, after applications opened on 22 May (day before in Singapore time), there are 1226 applicants for 1485 apartments in Compassvale Pearl and Punggol Sapphire. Presumably the demand will be comparable to previous times. I haven't applied for BTO in a while, but the last time I applied for mature estates flats, there were >10,000 applicants.
3) Presumably many of these applicants are first time applicants.
4) There are 1226 couples (mostly first-time? Maybe HDB has some stats they'd like to release to us) watching HDB's site like eagles, waiting for new sites. There will be more applicants, since the application closes on 5 June.
5) Ie, > 1,000 people queueing eagerly for a flat. No shortage? Right.
6) At this moment, another page of the HDB site shows 1691 flats for sale - 1485 under the BTO and the rest for bi-monthly sale. Ahh... 206 flats unsold, including 196 in the wonderful Jurong West locale. Of course there's no shortage.

There's no point talking about shortages versus those unsold flats. As one of those people looking for a flat, I can tell you - the prices of those JW flats are going to have to be much lower before people are going to want to buy them. Any househunter is going to look at a house and compare its value to him and the price he wants to pay for it. Rather than saying that those unsold flats (and the 30% in Coral Spring) reflect picky homeseekers, maybe HDB should look at those unsold flats and ask itself, why those flats can't be sold to 1000 over people looking for homes? Basically, value < price! And part of that crappy value includes things like : far out in the middle of nowhere; lack of facilities; far away from MRT station; 2nd floor above the !#$%^ hawker centre; surrounded by industrial factories; and the list goes on.

Even though JW is sooooo far away, I might move into a JW flat if it was sufficiently lowly-priced. If you have excess goods, slash the price!

Yes, I know the valuers give a price to the flat based on many factors, but if a valuer prices something at $x and no-one wants to buy it at that price, even with HDB subsidies, well that tells me the valuer is wrong!

Put it simply - there's a shortage of HDB flats which new owners find have a higher value than the price HDB is charging. There's a small glut of HDB flats in JW (and presumably the 30% in Coral Spring) which new owners find are lower value than the price HDB charges.

Put it another way - HDB is selling flats, and when it can't sell some of the lousier sets in its collection it calls buyers picky. So to force-sell those units, it's trying to scare first-time applicants that they'll lose their privileges if they reject some of the lousier, unwanted sets they offer up.

And they expect me to have 3 or more children in what house again?

A4369. Queue number 4369 out of 5700 applicants. Fourth time. Wtf.

Why home prices may not fall

I've mentioned a couple of times to friends that I'm waiting for home prices to fall with bust(/boom) cycle of the stock market and the economy. I've been told, it could take as many as 3 years. David Leonhardt suggests that it may take a while. Basically, when housing prices begin to fall, the fall in value is hidden by a decrease in volumes instead. Why? Because

"dropping the asking price below their purchase price — is especially difficult. It’s tantamount to admitting defeat."

So, I'll just have to keep waiting then...

House hunting again: I hate the HDB

Third time isn't lucky. My queue numbers are seeing inflation. For 278 flats in mature estates, my queue number is 09549. Out of 10000 applicants
What gives? They rolled twice and my two numbers were both terrible apparently.

HDB - go and **** yourself.

The search for Home: Part I - The first time

I reached a new milestone in life yesterday - my first time to view a house to consider buying it for myself.

It was a very strange experience. I tried to keep in mind all the principles which my shrewd mom had tried to drill into my mind from my youth. Things like, not seeming too enthusiastic to buy the place. Otherwise they'll charge you more. Criticize any shortcomings you find. So that they'll think you're not so keen.

Well - lol. No, my mom is not the hard-bitten cynic I'm painting her to be. But she had mentioned these things, and I was keeping them in my mind. So blame it on me, not my upbringing.

I'm naturally quite a positive person (except when I'm playing devil's advocate). And when I'm in this house, I'm thinking, wow, it's clean, it's spacious, no damn it's huge! If I'd gone to my friend's place and this was it, I'd be like, whoa, nice place you got here man. And I'd look past things like how the flat was old, how there was no aircon installed, how little wind there was.

But now, these were all the things that I was looking out for. Hmm.. no oven. Yeah, the floorboard is nice, but... Well, it's so windy outside, but so stuffy here, even though all the windows are open, you know?

And at the end of the day, guess what? Well, I didn't really like the place wonderfully - not enough, at any rate, to pay big buckets of cash I was still hoping to earn for it. Good thing, right? Not to overpay for a not-too-fantastic place. And yes, that is a good outcome.

I'm just wondering, whether I'll ever look at other people's homes the same way ever again.