Private Property In Singapore

Remember "dispensary" , "pharmacy" and "clinic" in my previous blogs. Another hit me some time ago. I was volunteering at an "orphanage" and was given their "Annual Report" to read. Somehow we have all come to associate this with public-listed companies. But I suppose any organisation which has an income and expenditure would have one. Whether if it should be named such is questionable as charities and "non-profit" organisations have that extra "trustee" element to it.

I am feeling down and under the weather. Nursing a sore throat, wheezing, mouth ulceration and a cough, I am still putting up with my lumbar fracture lower back pain. I am also stressed and this is what brought on all the attendant ills.

The pinnochios in my recent blog were four real estate agents and the extortionist cum doctorate-degree holder of a Chinese National tenant. I haven't a thing against them as a nation, but the ones I meet do leave a sour after-taste. And I did fall, almost to the point of exacting death, when Mr Doctoral PhD tenanted my room for just a measly month. Two weeks after he moved in to be precise.

As I did with all the rest of the unpleasant encounters in China and I haven't even related to you my experience in ShenZhen yet. That place just across the LuoWu border was swarming with prostitutes at the time of my visit several years ago. I have never seen so many out on the streets and even after flatly refusing their services, they were still shadowing me and I almost tripped at one stage. Beggars, thugs , the poor, and street urchins were everywhere.

The hotel, just next to the train station and border to Hongkong, where I put up for the day had prostitutes and their patrons hoarding almost the entire place.

Back to my main blog. I am counting on my real estate agent to provide me with up-to-the-minute information, the "expert" that she is. As a friend, I am on good terms with her. Unfortunately relying on her professional expertise, I found her wanting in so many respects.

She is so off-the-market. She isn't clued in on transacted prices (even inanely suggesting a market price which would have cost me a $60K deficit had I gone along with her) and I lost a whopping $10K in the process. It is no excuse, given the extremely high floor and strategic location I am on. My price should be better or equal to a similarly transacted one in a neighboring block.

This brings on a crucial element in compensation benefits for SERS residents who have to look out for market valuation and transacted prices as benchmarkers. In fact I think compensation should be a market valuation on top of the transacted price which would constitute fair value for their properties.

She is not even updated on current policies and statutory documentation proofs. If I am the sole owner selling my property I can't be possibly dead and thus need a death certificate now do I? What the blink is this ex-RGS and RGPS bimbo telling me to do, the associate directoress that she is in the realty company she works for. She is doing fairly well by all accounts too. A second-hand BMW, an executive condominium, two kids and one maid. Another director agent I engaged unsuccesfully for my first sale drove a brand new Mercedes and lived on landed property.

And there are lots of these agents plaguing the industry, hitters and runners. Fast lane, fast life and fast buck. Even if given prime properties as marketing tools, they can't sell.

Going on a hunt for private properties, namely the apartment-living sort, has left me in stitches . Wait till you hear what some private property developers have done to their unbelievably surreal development.

One had private elevators going right into your apartment. If you were in the elevator with Mr XY, there is no preventing Mr XY from stepping out from the lift as it stops on your floor and visit your apartment. How is that for private intrusion as well as private exclusivity of lift use. It could be a lot hotter under the collar if Mr XY is also Mr Rapist (XYY) or Mr Burglar (XYYY).

This same development has a underwater gym in the swimming pool. Yes folks, you read that right. Well it is actually only waist deep. This reminds me of another swanky and up-market condominium touted as a safari park some years back. The marketing media blitz was a laugh-a-minute trailer with its trumpeting elephants and roaring tigers. Hitherto, it is still marketing some unsold units. Perhaps the thought of wild animals living within human confines has frightened off potential home-seekers.

Finishes and fittings were in some cases no better than public houses. I have the same elevator buttons as one did. One had ceramic tiles finish. Even designs, supposedly done up by renowned foreign conceptualisers, were apalling to say the least. Grilled and industrial-park look. Others look more like apartment buildings rather than the condominium status they are accorded.

There seems to be a glut of private properties and next year more are being planned to be released. I can't see good urban planning here when parcels of land in close proximity are tendered out in the same breath. When developments start, they compete neck to neck simultaneously.

Opening up public housing to Singapore permanent residents for "specially talented" ones would seem reasonable who otherwise cannot afford private properties. However I don't see any in way of talent or cash-flushing our economy with some of them. In fact the only talent they have is coming into our shores and profiteering from us where the resale market is concerned for public houses. If not restrict them to the private residences where it would be better served.

We have built many new HDB towns which I think was a wrong strategy in the first place. I hope Punggol would be our last encroachment on our greenland. What we should have concentrated on was to rebuild our old blocks, without having to clear away existing reserve to make way for new ones. And to build not only 4-room, 5-room or executive apartments but the 3 rooms as well. In fact many of the older flats are bigger in space. Old blocks would then not be left deserted and decrepit.

All the lift-upgrading programs, hoo-ha of a 75% majority vote , hue and cry over incurring expenses would never have happened had elevators been built to stop at every floor in the first place. What were the administrators thinking? Humans were built to last? Their health will never fail them? They will never age?

I was bugged by a civil servant recently, whom I had with one stroke of the brush, tar most as pompous and officous. This one is no exception. He questioned if my training programmes have been applauded by the general public and if Donald Kirkpatrick's evaluation was to be used.

First let me rebutt this as totally preposterous when I have not even done this with his participants and if I never do, I never will get started, will I? Kirkpatrick's evaluation may not even apply (in fact in some quarters it is regarded as obsolete even) and I have our own unique assessment indicators pertinent to my kind of programs.

I am going to blog on a what a cab-driver remarked next. He was a Warrant Officer in the Singapore Armed Forces and now living on a meagre pension as he claimed. I remember our Retirement Age Act and Pension Act and my next script will address this, helping him out as to how the computation works.

Watch for the next blog!