There's been quite a bit of HDB-related news in the press in recent days. The minister in charge announced with aplomb that flat sizes hadn't shrunk in 15 years and that the gahmen might intervene if too many shoebox apartments are built, and two letters about removing the Cash-Over-Valuation (COV) component of resale purchases made it to TODAY.
Well flat sizes. I'm not sure about 3-rm flat footage but I can generally surmise that both 4-rm and 5-rm flats have lost about 10 sq m in area since the 80s. The former was generally about 100 sq m and the latter 120 sq m when I was growing up. Today fresh to-be-built flats are 90 and 110 sq m in their respective forms. I remember awful 95 sq m 5-rm flats in Sembawang. It was likely an experiment the planners had - start in an ulu estate with tiny apartments and see what happens. The location was unattractive enough and the diminished size became the proverbial salt in the wound. (It didnt help that geographically Sembawang is closer to Johor than Woodlands and there's a road called Jalan Ulu Sembawang there.) There was excess supply and the HDB had walk-in selections for readily available flats. A friend of mine bought one in such a situation. So given that we're all aware enough to see through the minister's statement, there have been multiple posts on FB making fun of the poor man. One picture had him with Pinnochio's nose.
It took me by surprise that the same minister implied that the gahmen might put a stop to developers churning out tiny Mickey Mouse apartments. Really? So private developers may not be able build what they will, on land they've leased for a century? That'll send ripples through the stock market if it ever happened. Some things are best left to market forces I think. Why mess with demand and supply for a niche segment? If people are rich enough to afford such places and live there with a pet or two, let it be. They'll move when their TV gets bigger than the wall area.
COVs are a pet peeve of mine. I had to fork out $25,000 on top of everything to own the flat I'm in now. Awful. So when I read those readers' letters I could empathise. If I could adjust the laws, HDB flats would only be sold back to the HDB at free market valuations and they'd be put into the usual Balance Of Flats sales. Simple as that. No extra cash to be forked out by buyers and sellers. What's not a pretty outcome from this is loss of agents' livelihoods. The HDB could employ them for viewings (someone's gotta open the door) if that became a necessity. I consider them a bit of a menace anyway. Most are after a quick buck and are solely interested in the sellers' interests. I have viewed flats like dumps with sellers' agents with balls to ask for ridiculous cash amounts. Buyers somehow have to fork out the moolah if they want a flat with very little real bargaining to bring prices down. And bargaining is never on the valuation price but on COV. It's become that stupid.
Yeah, everyone wants to make a buck but the buck had got to come from somewhere. With mass market housing, the effects will spiral. Leave flat prices to market forces, not the COV. Ban it altogether.
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