5/30/2011

The housing mess or housing achievement?

25,000 BTO flats will be built this year. And now Boon Wan is saying tens of thousands of rental flats are needed and building of rental flats must also be ramped up. Are these happy problems or manifestation of infested problems in public housing that are surfacing today? With 25,000 being built and the demand is still growing, and a shortfall of tens of thousands of rental flats! What’s happening? Didn’t MND know the problem or they did know the problem but not building because the policy maker decided otherwise? Or is it that the information on supply and demand was misleading that led to the current mess? MND data quoted in today’s ST said that there were 3,700 and 2,300 rental flat applicants for year 2008 and 2009 respectively. If these were the data that MND was working on, not more than 5,000 rental flats need to be built. How could the numbers balloon to tens of thousands of flats needed as mentioned by Boon Wan? Whatever, policy failure or information failure, something is wrong with the housing needs of the people. They can’t say they did not know or did not see it coming. Boon Wan is only in the job for a couple of weeks and he is in a big hurry to clear the mess. The media also reported some views that the ramping up of rental flats would have little impact on the price of private properties. Could this kind of thinking be the main determinant in the supply of public housing, both rental and purchase? There must be many big speculators out there hoarding 10 or 20 units of properties each and fearing that the prices will fall. So are the property developers, all fearing that their profits will fall. It is thus important that the supply of public housing be carefully managed to ensure that the speculators and property developers are happily sitting on huge profits. Yep, must not remove the $8k/$10k ceiling so that these young people have no choice but to support the private property market and help the speculators and developers to make handsome profits. Tell them there are cheap loans, low interest rates, just borrow, half a million, one million, just borrow, no problem. Hope the ramping up of BTO flats will not affect the price of private properties, or else speculators, big investors and developers will be hurt.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

The current minister is in a hurry to solve the mess that the previous minister compounded by his stupid and stubborn policies. He has already caused a huge shortage and escalating price problem, the new one will probably cause an over supply problem. After all these years, did it ever occur to them that you cannot build flats in 3 months?? You need a certain excess supply of flats.

Anonymous said...

it is not stupid and stubborn policies; those policies are design and calculated to jack up the housing price in Singapore so as to boost the GDP growth, so as to meet the KPI's of ministers to ensure they have a big bonus (8 months).
China uses this to maintain their strong GDP growth in the last 10 years; at the same time profit their municipal government.
Review of ministers and civil servant KPI's is needed to prevent similar problem from happening again

Wally Buffet said...

"Hope the ramping up of BTO flats will not affect the price of private properties, or else speculators, big investors and developers will be hurt."

Unlike you, I am hoping that all those speculators and kiasu buyers WILL be hurt and that we'll see lots of greedy men flying off buildings.

You gotta pay the price for the life you choose.

Each time the current incumbent speaks, his predecessor sinks deeper into the shit hole.

How the hell did we come to this mess?

Were it not for the results of the election and that short ass was sidelined, we would still be merrily artificially restricting supply and those greedy private developers helped by downstream demand would still be laughing all the way to the bank.

That focker also started the ERP. The current minister in charge should also look into whether such stupid methods of restricting car ownership or congestion which no other country in the world dares to employ really works or is it another camouflage for increasing the coffers.

Anonymous said...

If anyone is hopeful that the NEW(but old in service and age) Housing Minister is any different from the Former One, he or she must be new to Sin.

Is building more smaller(300sq ft?) unit flats for rental to the people any consolation?

Singaporeans and the Chinese especially, traditionally work very hard, for a good home. And a good home means a well built safe and affordable 'house' where the family can live better. And the bigger the house the higher their achievements and the better their live should be.

Now, we are getting Minister who is
planning to build dove houses so that his people can have shelters from the elements of nature. What a great improvement our leaders are providing us after nearly 5 decades of GREAT ACHIEVEMENTs!

Come on Singaporeans, we do have to compromise in life, however, we should not be compromised to the level they are bringing us to. And not to be compromised means getting and making the leaders to do their works competently and not resort to 'painkiller' but provide a remedy(cure).

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

This is a good example of why KPIs cannot work. Cause it is not the people's KPIs but the minister or his boss' KPIs which may be contrary to what the people want or detrimental to the people's interest.

The said...

BTO, as the name implies, is designed to be a sure-win formula for the develop (that is, HDB). Which private developer has the luxury of such pow-chiak way - build only when there is order. In other words, they only build to order when at least 80 or 90% of the units are already booked. In the past, the demand is such that they are hundreds of percent or thousands of percent over-subscribed.

How to meet demand, if you only build when more people queue up to buy your flats?

Anonymous said...

How many months of performance and growth bonuses did he get for the mess? We want to know.

Anonymous said...

Khaw Boon Wan must not "Kow Tow" to those blood sucking developers. So what if the properties prc drop by 5-10%. Developers are trying to outbid each other especially when the same developer already own site in the same location. They will then want to bid high for new land near the old site, hence setting new benchmark for the older sites.

Anonymous said...

We have to see whether ministerial salaries and performance bonuses, after review, will still be tied to GDP. Then we can guess in which direction the property market will head.

Building more is different from selling lower. If the price is kept artificially high to inflate the GDP figures, affordability is still one big problem.

Then, we are still back to square one, with the cow taking over from the horse, changing the wrappings but not the contents.

Anonymous said...

It is to increase the GDP, so that they would more months of bonus. Such an clever Minister. Don't have to think one leh

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

So far the losers in this housing game are the Singaporeans. And they will also be the one, their children and grandchildren, to hold on to the flats when the leases expire.

AAA investment grade.

Anonymous said...

Asset enhancements? Did we think carefully about it?

It is still 99 years minus the number of years already expired and logically the value should be going down year after year until zero value on reaching 99 years.

Even private properties with less than 60 years of lease left are being sold cheap but banks are not too keen to provide financing.

When the time comes and I am eligible for rental flats, I am going for it.