If you can’t afford to buy HDB, Its “Government problem”. However, if you can’t afford to buy private property, its will be your own area of concern.
As 80% of the Singaporean stay in HDB, government has to make HDB afforabable to everyone. Be it young couple, senior citizen or even low income families. Otherwise, opposition party during election will likely bring it up another “weapon” against you.
HDB however, being a public housing is never meant to be speculated. Its in place to ensure a roof for all Singaporean. When the HDB prices get out of acceptable levels, cooling measure will come thereafter. As you can from the HDB resale price index below, HDB prices start to moderate or dipped slightly since end of 2013.
Private properties prices on the other hand are expected to either dip slightly or hold well. There’s might be some one-off fire sales, but might have many of such fire sales. Last time in 2009, there are actually deferred payment scheme. When buyers actually unable to get loan when TOP as property prices dropped, they might be more serious to sell at a reasonable price or even enter into “fire sale”.
However, with goverment implementation of cooling measures and Total Debt Servicing Ratio over the past few years, deferred payment was scrapped and also, buyers of second property have to pay 50% of the property prices upfront and only loan that balance 50%. Thus, buyers that bought in recent years has low mortgage repayment due to their huge downpayment. Even if they can’t get good rental for their investment properties, they should be comfortable enough to pay off their low monthly mortgage loan.
