For investors

This page describes what is currently on offer to an accredited investor: a named manager, raising capital right now, for a scheme secured against or invested in Singapore real estate. It sits behind a declaration because the law requires that declaration before you can be shown the terms, and it exists only for as long as that manager's raise is open. When the raise closes, what was on this page closes with it. Nothing here is a general education page about property investing in the abstract — those live at /invest, /invest/structures, /invest/private-credit and /invest/equity. This one is about the mechanics of committing capital to a scheme, not about buying a home.

What is actually on offer

A scheme of this kind reaches you through one of three routes under the Securities and Futures Act, and which route it uses tells you most of what you need to know about how it is regulated. A restricted scheme is offered under section 305 to "relevant persons" — accredited and institutional investors — or at a minimum of S$200,000 per transaction; the offeror must notify MAS through the CISNet portal before the offer is made, appear on MAS's list of restricted schemes, give you an information memorandum, use a manager licensed or regulated to manage the scheme's property, and lodge an annual declaration for as long as it keeps relying on the exemption.

A small offer takes a different exemption: it raises S$5 million or less in any rolling 12 months and goes to no more than 50 persons in that period. It needs no CISNet notification the way a restricted scheme does, but it still cannot be advertised and still carries its own disclosure conditions.

Or the vehicle itself is a Variable Capital Company — a fund structure available in Singapore since January 2020, standalone or an umbrella with segregated sub-funds, which must be managed by a MAS-licensed or MAS-registered manager. The manager side of all three routes converges on the same requirement: a company running a pooled real-estate-backed vehicle needs a Capital Markets Services licence as a Licensed Fund Management Company, unless it fits a specific exemption such as the simplified regime for venture-capital-only managers, or the carve-out for managing money solely for related corporations or family members.

What the capital actually does once raised varies by manager and by scheme: some schemes lend — private credit secured against Singapore property, effectively standing in the position a bank or a licensed moneylender would occupy, but funded by investors instead of deposits; others hold equity directly, buying and later selling or refinancing the underlying property. Ask which one you are being shown before you read anything else on the term sheet, because the two have almost nothing in common once you get past both being called "property investment."

Eligibility — the accredited investor test, and what it actually gates

You must qualify as an accredited investor before a manager can show you this page's contents at all, and qualifying is not enough on its own — you must actively opt in, in writing or by another recorded medium, and the institution must explain to you which regulatory protections you are giving up by doing so. Everyone starts as a retail investor by default, with the full suite of safeguards; nothing removes those safeguards silently.

• Over S$2,000,000 in net personal assets, with your primary residence counted at no more than S$1,000,000 of that figure
• Or over S$1,000,000 in net financial assets
• Or over S$300,000 in income in the preceding 12 months

If you are subscribing through a company rather than personally, the corporate test is separate: the corporation qualifies as an accredited investor if its net assets exceed S$10 million, or if every one of its shareholders is independently an accredited investor.

Two details catch people out. First, a trust beneficiary's interest can count toward that beneficiary's own net personal or financial assets, but only where the interest is absolutely or indefeasibly vested and immediately enjoyable — a discretionary interest you might one day receive does not qualify you. Second, your primary residence is defined as the home you actually live in most of the time, in Singapore or overseas, not any property you own.

Opting in can be revoked. Withdrawing your consent does not unwind a subscription you already made — transactions entered into before the opt-out stand.

Citizenship status: the vehicle's classification, not your passport

For a direct residential purchase, your own citizenship sets the Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty rate — nil, 20% or 30% for a Singapore Citizen depending on how many properties you already own, 5% then 30% for a Permanent Resident, 60% for most foreigners, and Singapore Citizen treatment for nationals of the United States, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland under our free trade agreements. None of that reasoning carries across to a scheme. Where the vehicle holding the property is a trust or an entity, ABSD is charged at the entity rate of 65% by default, regardless of the citizenship of the investors behind it — your US passport does not lower a fund's own ABSD bill the way it would lower yours on a flat you buy in your own name.

The one carve-out that matters here: the 2022 ABSD (Trust) regime explicitly excludes trustees acting for collective investment schemes, business trusts and housing developers from the 65% trust rate — which is precisely why a genuine, properly licensed CIS wrapper is the structure a serious manager reaches for, and why a scheme organised as an ordinary family living trust is a much more expensive way to hold the same property. Confirm which side of that line the specific scheme sits on; it is not automatic just because the word "fund" appears in the name.

So the citizenship question to ask about a scheme is not "am I a Singapore Citizen, PR, foreigner or FTA national" — it is "is the entity holding this property a qualifying CIS trustee, or is it an ordinary company or trust paying the 65% rate on the way in." That answer belongs in the information memorandum, not in a conversation about your own citizenship at all.

Taxes: paid by the scheme, felt by you

Buyer's Stamp Duty is payable on the underlying property regardless of who holds it, on the ordinary progressive schedule, with no citizenship-based exemption at any level. Mortgage duty on any loan the scheme takes out is 0.4% of the loan amount, capped at S$500.

Seller's Stamp Duty runs on whichever schedule matches the underlying asset class: four years for residential property, tapering 16%, 12%, 8%, 4%; a separate three-year schedule for industrial property at 15%, 10%, 5%. A scheme built around commercial property such as office or fully commercial retail generally faces no SSD schedule at all — among the reasons a manager might choose that asset class for a shorter-horizon strategy over residential.

Property tax on a scheme-held asset is charged at non-owner-occupier rates by construction — a fund does not live in the flat it holds — so residential holdings sit on the higher progressive non-owner-occupier bands, and commercial or industrial holdings sit on the flat 10% of Annual Value that applies to non-residential property generally.

How rental or interest income flows through to you depends on the wrapper. Through a company, income is taxed at the corporate rate of 17% before any distribution reaches you, with property tax on the same property deductible against that same rental income. Through a transparent structure such as a limited partnership, there is no tax at the vehicle level at all: rental income is brought into the partnership's accounts and distributed by profit-sharing ratio, and each investor is taxed on their own share under their own name, in their own tax return, at their own rate.

Ask, specifically, which of those two your subscription sits inside — it changes both your own filing obligation and, materially, how much of a headline yield actually survives to reach you.

Borrowing: what gearing does at the entity level

Where a scheme buys residential property directly rather than lending against it, entity-level borrowing is capped hard: MAS limits a non-individual borrower to 15% loan-to-value, against 75% for an individual's first home loan. Combine that with the 65% entity ABSD rate and the arithmetic gets brutal fast — on a S$2,000,000 purchase, ABSD alone is S$1,300,000, the loan tops out at S$300,000, and total cash required runs to roughly 153% of the purchase price before any other cost. That single fact is most of why the schemes actually raising on this shelf tend to be private credit — lending against property rather than owning it — or built around commercial and industrial assets that carry no ABSD at all, rather than schemes that buy homes outright.

The Total Debt Servicing Ratio framework that caps an individual borrower at 55% of gross income does not reach a genuine company borrower the way it reaches you personally; a thinly capitalised company built around one or two directors gets looked through instead, with MAS assessing the loan against the director's personal finances. Where the scheme itself borrows to gear its portfolio — a fund-level credit facility, sometimes called a subscription line or a warehouse facility — the terms are set manager to lender and are not on this shelf as a published rate; read the fund's own leverage covenant in the information memorandum, specifically the maximum gearing ratio and what happens to distributions if it is breached.

Control: where reno, A&A and rebuild actually sit

On every other page on this site, control over renovation, addition-and-alteration or a full rebuild belongs to the owner — it is the lever an owner-occupier or a landlord pulls to lift value or rent. In a scheme, that lever belongs entirely to the manager. If the strategy involves buying tired stock and adding value through refurbishment or a rebuild before exit, the decision to spend, the choice of contractor, the timeline and the budget all sit inside the fund's own governance, not yours — you find out what happened in the manager's reporting, after the fact.

The economics behind that decision are the same ones covered on this site's rebuild pages: an extensive addition-and-alteration project can run 60% to 80% of the cost of a full rebuild without the benefit of starting from a clean structure, and a genuine rebuild is financed through a construction loan drawn in stages against certified progress, interest charged only on what has actually been drawn. None of that financing sits on your own balance sheet as an LP — it sits on the scheme's, and its cost is one of the line items your return is net of.

Conveyancing: done for the vehicle, not for you

You do not sign a Sale and Purchase Agreement, and you are not a party to the property's own conveyancing. The manager's lawyers handle that on the scheme's behalf — there is no government-set fee schedule for private conveyancing in Singapore, so this is a negotiated legal cost the vehicle bears, disclosed (or not) in its own expense budget, not billed to you individually.

What you sign instead is a subscription agreement into the scheme, alongside your accredited investor declaration and opt-in. CPF cannot fund that subscription outside the specific, narrow list the CPF Investment Scheme already permits — CPFIS-OA allows up to 35% of investible savings in property funds specifically, which is the one route by which CPF money can touch a vehicle like this at all, and even then only above the S$20,000 Ordinary Account floor the scheme leaves untouched.

Estate: what actually transfers

What you own, for estate purposes, is your interest or your units in the scheme — not a share of the underlying property itself. That interest passes under your own will, or under intestacy if you have none, the same as any other investment holding you own personally, subject to whatever transfer restriction the fund's own constitutive documents impose: a redemption gate, a lock-up period still running, or a requirement that the manager or general partner consent to a transfer to your estate's beneficiary before it can register.

If the scheme continues to generate income after you die and before your estate is fully administered, that income is assessed to the estate itself, and your executor or administrator files Form T — the estate and trust income tax return — by 15 April each year until the estate is wound up. This runs alongside, not instead of, whatever the scheme's own manager reports to your estate as its administrator handles the holding.

The twelve questions this page asks about every scheme

Two questions sort what you are actually looking at, and neither of them is whether you plan to occupy the property — nobody commits capital believing it will fall, so that question sorts nobody.

Q1. Are you borrowing to buy? For most subscriptions into a scheme like this, no — you commit cash, and the vehicle itself does whatever gearing it does at the entity level, on its own balance sheet, under its own covenant. If you personally borrow to fund your subscription, that loan sits against your own other assets, entirely off the scheme's books, and the scheme's own performance has no bearing on your obligation to repay it.

Q2. Once you hold it, are you lending it out? This is the question that actually splits the schemes on offer into two different animals wearing one name. A private credit scheme has you lending your capital out from the start — the manager lends it on, secured against someone else's property, and you are paid interest. An equity scheme has you owning a let-out (or held-for-appreciation) asset at one remove, through the vehicle. Ask a manager which quadrant their specific scheme sits in before you read a single return projection.

C0 — The play

A private credit scheme is a cash-flow play by design: it exists to generate and distribute interest income on a schedule. An equity scheme is closer to a balance-sheet play, marked to the manager's own periodic NAV revaluation rather than a market price you can check yourself. Know which one you are being shown before you judge it on the other one's terms.

C1 — Balance sheet

What you own is an interest or units in the scheme. What you owe, ordinarily, is nothing further — your exposure is capped at what you subscribed, unless the fund documents specifically provide for capital calls beyond your initial commitment, which some structures do.

C2 — Cash flow

Cash moves on the scheme's own schedule, not on a monthly rent cheque. Between your capital call and the first distribution there is often a real funding gap — money committed, nothing yet returned — and you need to be able to sit through it without needing that cash back on your own timetable.

C3 — P&L

Reported performance can move before cash does. A private credit vehicle can recognise accrued interest income before it is actually collected; an equity vehicle can mark an underlying asset down — or up — in its own NAV before that asset is ever sold. What the fund reports as return in a given period is not the same thing as what has landed in your account.

C4 — Carry

Carry here means the scheme's own net income after its own costs of capital and its own fees — management fees and, often, a performance fee on top, a drag that a direct residential landlord on this site's other pages never pays. A scheme can show a healthy gross yield on the underlying asset and still hand you a thin net distribution once its own fee load is taken out first.

C5 — Give / get

You give cash and liquidity, locked up for a term you do not control. You get whatever return, and whatever timing of that return, the manager's strategy and the underlying asset actually deliver — stated as a target in the information memorandum, not as a guarantee.

C6 — Exposed to

Everything the underlying property is exposed to — rates, vacancy, construction risk on a value-add strategy — plus one layer this site's other pages do not carry: the manager's own judgment, operational competence and solvency. A well-run scheme and a badly-run scheme can hold an identical property and produce very different outcomes for you.

C7 — For how long

Asian private credit funds of this kind are typically closed-ended, offered to accredited and institutional investors, with lock-ups and redemption gates written directly into the fund documents — the horizon is the fund's own term, not a date you pick.

C8 — Failure cascade

The order matters, and it runs differently here than it does for a landlord holding a flat directly. MAS's own 2026 thematic inspection of fund managers found one manager had reclassified restructured non-performing loans as performing without a valuation adjustment — overstating NAV and overpaying itself management fees on the inflated figure. Translate that into the cascade this site uses everywhere else: a manager's own mismarking or a genuine deterioration in the underlying credit first shows up as negative carry inside the fund, which then hits the fund's own cash flow (distributions cut or suspended), which accumulates into a markdown of NAV, which can trigger a redemption gate — your own illiquidity — well before anything resembling the fund's own insolvency is declared. You feel the squeeze at the gate stage, often long before the headline outcome is known.

C9 — Liquidity

Worse than physical property in the case that actually matters. There is no open market to sell your interest into the way there is a resale market for a condo. Redemption, if the scheme offers it at all, runs on the fund's own gate, on the fund's own timetable, and often at the fund's own determined price — not yours, and not necessarily the market's.

C10 — Control

None. This is the clearest price-taker position on this entire site. You do not choose whether the underlying asset gets renovated, refinanced, held longer or sold — the named manager does, entirely, and you find out afterward through their reporting.

C11 — The exit

The fund's own maturity or wind-up, or a secondary transfer of your interest that usually needs the general partner's or manager's consent before it can register — not a listing you can put on the open market the way a direct property sale has one.

Who this raise actually employs

A scheme like this is not one relationship — it is several, and each is paid separately, mostly out of the fund's own budget rather than directly by you. The manager needs a Capital Markets Services licence as a Licensed Fund Management Company, or a specific exemption, before it can manage a pooled vehicle like this at all; that licence, not a marketing brochure, is the thing to actually verify before you subscribe.

• The manager — CMS-licensed or exempt, decides strategy, gearing and every asset-level call
• The fund's lawyers — structure the vehicle (VCC, limited partnership or unit trust) and draft the information memorandum you sign against
• The trustee or custodian — for a VCC, holds scheme assets segregated from the manager's own balance sheet and from any other sub-fund's assets
• The fund administrator — runs NAV calculation and your own investor reporting
• The auditor — signs off the fund's own accounts, filed annually
• CEA-registered property agents — if the scheme itself buys or sells physical property, engaged and paid by the fund, not by you

For a Variable Capital Company specifically, an umbrella structure with multiple sub-funds keeps each sub-fund's assets, liabilities and accounts legally segregated from every other sub-fund, and each must file its own annual returns — a real protection if one sub-fund inside a larger umbrella goes wrong, but only if the vehicle you are actually subscribing into is genuinely structured that way, which is a question for the information memorandum, not an assumption.

What the realtor earns here — and where the incentive points

Two different people can both be called "agent" in a conversation about this scheme, and they are not doing the same job. The first is a CEA-registered salesperson who transacts the scheme's own underlying property on the fund's behalf — buying, selling or leasing the physical asset. That agent earns a commission from the fund, freely negotiated with no fixed or prescribed rate, whether or not your own investment in the scheme ultimately performs; the commission is earned on the transaction closing, full stop, same as any buyer's or seller's agent on any other page of this site.

The second is whoever actually introduced you, personally, to this scheme. That is the relationship to look at hardest. MAS and CEA's own joint position, stated in a letter dated 16 December 2025, is explicit: a property agent is prohibited from acting as a financial advisory representative under the Financial Advisers Act, precisely to stop an agent steering a client toward whichever product pays the agent more, and any yield or return claim an agent makes must be backed by verifiable facts, not a projection dressed as a fact.

So if the person who brought this scheme to you is a property agent rather than someone holding the relevant CMS or Financial Advisers Act licence, the plain question to ask is: under what licence are you allowed to be discussing this with me at all, and are you being paid a placement or referral fee by the manager for bringing me in? That fee, if it exists, comes out of the same economics your own return is funded from — it is not a cost that appears anywhere on your statement, but it is a cost all the same, and it points the introducer's incentive toward getting you into the raise, not toward whether the raise is actually right for you.