Property cooling measures: Govt announces tighter loan rules, private home owners can't buy HDB resale flats for 15 months

In a bid to moderate demand for public housing, the authorities have announced that private property owners will now have to serve a temporary wait-out period of 15 months after selling their homes before they are allowed to buy a non-subsidised resale flat.

In addition, new rules have also been announced to tighten maximum loan amount limits, in order to promote prudent borrowing by property buyers as interest rates rise.

The loan-to-value limit for loans taken with the Housing and Development Board (HDB) will also be lowered from 85 per cent to 80 per cent. This means that the maximum loan amount HDB will lend to flat buyers will be 80 per cent of the property purchase price.

These new measures were announced by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Ministry of National Development (MND) and HDB in a joint statement late on Thursday (Sept 29) night, about 20 minutes before they took effect at midnight.

The authorities said that since the Government rolled out a broad package of measures in December last year, the HDB Resale Price Index has gone up by more than 5 per cent as at the end of June this year, which reflected a broad-based increase in public housing demand.