As written in our last article about buying houses for 1st time buyers, you would have read about the current economic trends for HDB houses. Next, we discussed about renovation and perhaps engaging an interior designer as well for your new home.

It is important to note, before you start buying your household furniture there is one thing you need to do first. And that is painting your HDB or Condo house with beautiful colours. Generally most people think white is a good colour. Painting your home comes right after your contractor completed the tiling of your floor. Only then can you proceed with painting your walls. There are people who save costs by painting their own flats. But if you do not want to get your hands dirty and want a very well painted wall, you can go on and hire a HDB painting contractor to do the job for you. We recommend Colour Creative Painting Service as they have been in the painting industry for over 20 years with very highly experienced painters who can beautify your home with excellent painting quality.

Most painting contractors would give a warranty for the paint they use, the popular paints being used are mainly ICI Dulux and Nippon paint. They will also provide plastic sheets to cover your furniture so that the paint does not drip onto your household furniture. Painting would normally take about 1-3 days for HDB flats. Before you engage a painting service firm, you may want to request to take a look at some pictures of their previous clients houses after being painted so you can have a gauge on how good your painting contractor is. Good price is one thing, but good quality is another. Speak to your painting contractor first and find out their terms of delivery and service before you engage one to paint your house.

You have just gotten married and you are looking to settle down with your own newly wed spouse in your own house. In this article we share insights on the kind of houses that are worth as assets and investment to you.

As the recent high influx of FW and FTs, the prices of resale HDB flats and private property has soared tremendously. This includes HDB flats for 1st time buyers. The price of a 1st hand BTO HDB is now comparable the same price or slightly more expensive than resale HDBs in some areas of Singapore. 1st time HDB buyers used to stand a chance of great savings as they are able to buy new flats at about 30-40% lower than resale flat prices. However now this may no longer be the case, with much higher housing demands than before of a 5.9million population now and only about 9-12k new HDB flats released per year, it is not a wonder that prices would rise so high.

It may be a relieve for the younger generation (well for the time being) when the government introduced cooling measures in August 2010 to “burst the housing bubble” which mainly affected private property land owners. A new rule came about that private property owners are now not allowed to own both a condo and a HDB at the same time. This would result in many condo owners having to sell their condos to live in HDB which would again maintain or drive HDB prices even higher.

This is our advise for 1st time home buyers, due to limited budget for most newly wed couples it may be better to buy homes in younger estates such as punggol, sengkang as the prices for a 1st hand here are lower in price compared to resale price values. The flats in these location may not prove to be of a good investment value now but there is nothing much you can choose if you want to settle down with limited budget. If your income earnings are higher than the average, you may then want to consider buying 1st time homes from more matured estates but this would also mean a higher risk as you will now have to pay more per month installment for your home. However, given a scenario that a new 5 room flat cost $500k in mature estates and the current resale flat in the same location cost $600k. You may not be able to have that much of a investment yield. It may be possible for such a HDB flat to go up to 700k in the good times. But if more cooling measures were to be introduced into the HDB market due to younger generations not being able to afford one and start a family, things may change in the future.

Not to forget that buying a house is only the 1st step of a big cost. Other big upfront costs includes renovation, furniture, interior designing and painting your HDB flat. We have to have given you some insights on the current housing market before you dive into it.