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It is timely that our Government should rescind the strict ruling on foreigners buying landed properties in Singapore. It was imposed decades ago due to abuses and loose regulations then that affected citizens.

Over the years that I have witnessed the development of our property market, there has been no runaway prices seen in the 1960s.

I have been a supporter of conserving old landed properties and, having invested heavily in one, I found that for more than 10 years, I have yet to see any increase in my landed property which is a conservation terrace house, fully modernised at great cost, without expecting any subsidy from the Government.

Now that I have a need to dispose of my conservation property to reduce my costly bank borrowing, I face great hardship in trying to dispose of my conservation property for two main reasons.

I have foreigners keen to buy but they are put off by the need to apply for special permission which takes time. As a result, while condominium prices have gone up since last year, my conservation property of 3,000 sq ft remains stagnant in terms of price increases. Even if I could sell, the price is very low.

I appeal to the Government to rescind this ruling so that those of us who have maintained conservation properties for the good of the nation would not be penalised in this way.

Anna Su-Yin Wang (Ms)

Source : Straits Times - 28 Jun 2007

MR MADHO Prasad Shroff’s letter, ‘Condo residents hit by club lights” (Online forum, June 26), raises the interesting issue of whether a swimming, golf or country club is liable for the tort of nuisance if the well-being of residents in an adjoining condo is adversely affected by excessive lights emanating from the club.

The Latin phrase, ’sic utera tuo ut alienam non laedas”, means that one must use one’s property in such a fashion so as not to disturb your neighbours.

Nuisance is divided into ‘public nuisance” and ‘private nuisance”, depending on the extent of the harm or annoyance.

If the harm is suffered by one or a particular group of people, it is a private nuisance. A public nuisance is one where citizens generally, or a substantial number of members of the public, are harmed or unreasonably inconvenienced.

Private nuisance is a tort where the defendant has unreasonably and substantially interfered with the plaintiff’s reasonable use and enjoyment of his land.

Such nuisance includes the malfunctioning of sewage systems, excessive noise, directing your CCTV at your neighbour’s gate or pointing your floodlights into your neighbour’s compound for an extended period of time .

A court would normally assess the reasonableness of any nuisance based on what would be found tolerable by the ordinary occupier of reasonable fortitude.

The standard is the ordinary man which means abnormal sensitivities may prevent a claim if the nuisance would not have otherwise unreasonably interfered with an ordinary occupier.

It is not necessary to prove fault on the part of the defendant. The court would weigh the inconvenience to the plaintiff against the usefulness of the defendant’s conduct under the prevailing circumstances.

In private nuisance, the interference must be substantial, not trivial. For example, the building of a hospital next to a person’s land was held not to be a nuisance. However, courts have found dust from a sawmill, noise from racing boats or even funeral parlours as nuisances to neighbours.

Nuisance is a tort of strict liability. This means that once the damages and causation have been proven, it is no defence to argue that you have taken all reasonable precautions. The remedy for a nuisance is either an injunction or monetary damages.

In our HDB estate, the lights at the basketball court are switched off at 10pm and all residents are expected to put up with the noise of bouncing balls which is deemed to be reasonable.

If the club in question has seriously interfered with the quiet enjoyment of the condo residents by the emanation of excessive lights that have gone past the boundaries of their property for an unreasonable length of time and the gravity of the harm (causing residents to suffer from insomnia) outweighs the utility of the conduct of the defendant, the plaintiff may make a claim in nuisance.

Heng Cho Choon

Source : Straits Times - 28 Jun 2007

MY FIANCEE and I joined the balloting for a four-room HDB flat in Bukit Merah in February under the Selective En-bloc Redevelopment Scheme (Sers) and we received a queue number in excess of 2,000.

Altogether, there were more than 2,100 applications for the four-room flats, of which only the first 1,000 applicants were invited to select from among 400-plus units.

According to the HDB website then, priority would be given to first-time buyers and those under the Married Child Priority Scheme (MCPS).

However, this did not appear to be the case in our case. My fiancee and I are first-timers and we qualify under the MCPS. We would thus have had four times more chances in the balloting than those who were second-timers or who were not living near their parents. If we had been given priority, why was our queue number in excess of 2,000?

I would like the HDB management to relook the balloting procedures for the Bi-monthly, Sers and other schemes.

Why not give priority to first-timers in the balloting? Newlyweds need a new home in which to start a family. Having just started working, resale flats, which cost much more, are beyond their reach, even with the $40,000 housing grant, especially amid the soaring property market.

Second-timers wanting to upgrade or downgrade their home can wait because they have a house to live in.

Moreover, the Government is encouraging young people to set up families early and to live near their parents.

How can we set up a family without a roof, especially when our parents’ place (a four-room flat) is small and congested?

I hope the HDB will look into this matter and resolve the problem quickly.

Leonard Tan Choa Wei

Source : Straits Times - 27 Jun 2007

With property prices rising, it is common to hear housing agents talk of ‘a landlord’s market’.

I heard these words from at least eight housing agents when I was looking for a place to rent last March.

Rentals quoted in the classifieds for a private apartment were often the equivalent or more than the standard pay of a fresh graduate of about $2,000.

There is an avalanche of issues to watch out for, with potential pitfalls everywhere.

For a start, the descriptions of apartments are often inaccurate.

I found that the agent’s description often failed to tally with the actual state of the apartment.

One studio apartment with the tagline ‘compact and comfortable with old world charm’ turned out to be a tiny room in an old mansion, with creaky and dusty furniture from the ’70s.

The shower cubicle was so narrow that you could not turn around while you showered. And the ‘kitchenette’ was more like a hole in the wall.

Then there are the pressure tactics.

Most agents will tell you that you better make up your mind immediately or ‘tens of other prospective tenants’ will snap it up soon.

This isn’t entirely untrue though. In some good locations, the apartment could be rented out within a day of the advertisement.

In many cases, it’s difficult to negotiate the deal as the landlords are not even present.

In my case, one of the agents wanted me to write out a cheque for a month’s rent, in the landlord’s name.

He told me he would be collecting cheques from two other prospective tenants. He would then let the landlord decide which tenant he wanted. If I wasn’t chosen, the cheque would be returned to me the next day.

NO GUARANTEE

He also wanted me to sign a letter of intent, without the landlord’s signature.

As there was no guarantee I would get it, I declined.

And the agent’s reply? Prospective tenants who did not issue a cheque would be considered ‘insincere’ and thus be least likely to get it.

For me, I decided to back out because there was no assurance that the landlord wouldn’t take my money and run, save for the agent’s word.

And I hardly knew the agent either, to trust him so much.

The agent who takes you to view the apartment may not even know the landlord as he may have another agent.

Should the landlord run away, there is little the agents can do to help since they may not have details of the landlord either.

I know because something similar happened to me too.

Like the four Indian nationals, I paid a deposit of $1,600, and signed a letter of intent without the landlord’s signature, as he was supposedly abroad and accepted a receipt similar to the one given to Mr Saravanankumar.

I was told I could move in two weeks later, but that didn’t happen. The agent was also of no help initially, because she went on leave.

While I was able to recover my deposit from the agent eventually, I was still left in the lurch three days before I was scheduled to move.

Fortunately I found another apartment, although at a higher rent and at a less convenient location.

So what can be done to protect tenants in a landlord’s market?

With the en-bloc fever, tenants also stand to lose if the building is put up for sale because most tenancy agreements have an escape clause for landlords.

But there may not be any such escape clause for tenants. If tenants sign for a two-year lease and break it, the landlord keeps the deposit.

While there is the Institute of Estate Agents, which aims to protect the interests of estate agents as well as members of the public who engage their services, there doesn’t seem to be a body to regulate landlords.

In the rental market, it is very much left to tenants to navigate their way through property agents and landlords while figuring out the rental procedure and bearing the risks involved.

Perhaps it is time to regulate the rental market and provide clear guidelines for the process. Until then, the only alternative left for aggrieved tenants would be to approach the Small Claims Tribunal to recover their money.

Source : The New Paper - 25 Jun 2007

I AM touched by the article on the en bloc phenomenon, ‘Can money ease loss of memories?’ by Ms Linda Lim (ST, June 21).

I want to share my personal experience on property transactions here though I did not benefit from any en bloc sales in any property transactions.

So far, I have sold three properties and stayed in six places in my short married life of 15 years.

The other three properties were all rental units with one in Tasmania, Australia, which we stayed in for about a year.

I have heard of friends moving house every other year just to enjoy some profits from the property transaction. I fear that they do not consider how their children feel when they move houses.

We were very lucky in our first two transactions, making a total of close to half a million dollars - one transaction from a HDB executive unit netted us about $400,000 and the other from a private unit about $150,000.

We, nevertheless, lost more than $100,000 in our third private property transaction as we felt that the interest rate was too high for us to bear over a prolonged period of repayment but still could have enough to pay off a HDB maisonette that we bought recently.

Sad to say we were very poor stewards of the property profits and squandered them all away on overseas trips and extravagant purchases. We also made some wrong investment choices. As the saying goes, ‘Easy come easy go’. For en bloc benefactors, let this be a gentle reminder to all to use your money wisely.

We lived in the third property for well over five years and had pleasant memories there. Our daughter also grew up there during her primary-school years.

We even built up a good rapport with our neighbours and enjoyed the ample space of the property. We were familiar with the area and I would say that a home is built over many pleasant memories of laughter and conversation in the house.

We missed our home and our friends immensely when we moved out last year. I was sleepless for a period before the move. I was also unprepared at how the move impacted my daughter.

During the last week of our stay in the house, our daughter could not pack her room and was depressed for a period.

She needed us to help her pack her stuff.

On the day that the movers came, she locked herself in the room and did not want to see the movers move our boxes to the new place. She came out only when the house had been emptied.

As parents, it was difficult for us to watch such an emotional spectacle. She felt that the security of the home had been destroyed and removed from her. To her, it was not just a house but a place where she could feel secure and anchored.

Until now, it pains us to pass by the property, recalling pleasant memories which are no longer ours to treasure and enjoy. It was an experience that I did not anticipate when we sold the property. Maybe there were too many pleasant memories that we had brought into the house over the years which we were reluctant to disengage from.

My advice to the en bloc benefactors is to ask yourself whether money can buy memories? Those memories are built over the years through efforts made to grow your house into a home which no collective sales money can buy.

Our children will dearly miss them as they treasure those memories that were stored in a place called home.

If you move too much, your children’s anchor will be shaken. Their heart will also turn cold as they could not understand why money is more important than how they feel about the security and familiarity of a home.

Gilbert Goh Keow Wah

Source : Straits Times - 25 Jun 2007