Private credit, from the lender's side

Borrow/private-credit describes what a property owner gets when a bank says no and a private lender says yes: fast money against real estate, priced above a bank rate, outside a bank's rulebook. This page is the same instrument, read from the other side of the table. You are not borrowing. You are the capital — an individual, a family office, or money inside a fund — deciding whether to be the one who gets paid to say yes.

The mechanics: what you are actually buying

When you write a private credit loan against a Singapore property, you are buying a debt instrument: a right to interest, a right to repayment of principal, and — if the borrower defaults — a right to force a sale of the collateral, in that order. MAS's own account of the exposure is thin: an April 2026 parliamentary reply says only that 'Singapore financial institutions have very small exposure to private credit' and gives no figure at all for the local market. A law firm's own read of the broader picture is more concrete: Asia-Pacific private credit assets under management were reported at roughly US$120 billion by the end of 2023, about double the level four years earlier, with Singapore named as the region's hub for origination and restructuring, a S$1 billion government Private Credit Growth Fund from Budget 2025, and a Temasek platform seeded with about US$10 billion.

There are three separate ways to be on this side of the trade, and they are not interchangeable. You can lend directly — one lender, one borrower, one property, through a broker or on your own. You can become a licensed moneylender and run it as a business. Or you can put money into a pooled private credit fund managed by a licensed manager, typically closed-ended, with a lock-up and a redemption gate written into the fund documents rather than a listed market you can exit on a screen.

• Direct private lending — you or your family office write the loan yourself, usually through a broker who works with a panel of lenders
• Licensed moneylending — you register as a business under the Moneylenders Act and lend under its rate caps
• A pooled fund — an accredited-investor allocation into a closed-end vehicle a Capital Markets Services licensee manages on your behalf

Who can actually do this: eligibility

Lending your own money against someone else's property sounds like something you can just do. It mostly is not. Under the Moneylenders Act, running a business of lending money needs a licence unless you fall inside a narrow carve-out: an 'excluded moneylender' is one who lends solely to corporations, limited liability partnerships, REIT trustees, or accredited investors. If your prospective borrower is an ordinary individual homeowner and you are lending as a business rather than a genuine one-off, you are the thing the Act is written to regulate, whether or not you call yourself a lender or an investor.

Becoming a licensed moneylender is its own eligibility bar, reported by several secondary guides and not independently confirmed against MinLaw's own text this run: at least S$100,000 in paid-up capital, Singapore Citizenship or PR status for an individual applicant or Singapore incorporation for a company, a clean criminal record, and a pass on the Moneylender's Test, followed by registration with the Registry of Moneylenders. Since March 2024 the Registrar has also required a test-qualified manager, an approved bank account with anti-money-laundering controls, GIRO or e-payment, and face-to-face onboarding.

Running a pooled vehicle rather than lending your own book is a different licence entirely. MAS's Fund Management Licensing page states that a company carrying on fund management business — which includes managing a pooled private credit vehicle for other people's money — needs a Capital Markets Services licence as a Licensed Fund Management Company, unless exempted. A simplified Venture Capital Fund Manager regime exists, but only for venture-capital-only managers, not for private credit. Managing money for related corporations or family members under section 99 of the Securities and Futures Act needs no licence at all — the exemption that makes a genuine family office structure workable without a full CMS licence.

The fund route asks a different question: not whether you can lend, but whether you can be sold the fund unit at all. An individual accredited investor needs over S$2 million in net personal assets, with the primary residence counted up to S$1 million of that, or over S$1 million in net financial assets, or over S$300,000 of income in the preceding 12 months. Below those lines, a private credit fund is generally not something you can be offered.

• S$2 million net personal assets, primary residence capped at S$1 million of that — one accredited-investor test
• S$1 million net financial assets — the alternative test
• S$300,000 income in the preceding 12 months — the third test; any one of the three qualifies you

Citizenship and status: whose nationality actually matters here

Your own citizenship barely touches your ability to be a lender. There is no ABSD-style surcharge on writing a loan, no residency test buried in the Moneylenders Act beyond the SC/PR requirement for an individual licence applicant above, and a fund unit is sold on the accredited-investor test, not a passport. Citizenship matters instead on the other side of the loan — in the borrower and the collateral you are underwriting. Singapore Citizens, Permanent Residents, most foreigners, and nationals of the US, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland — taxed as citizens under Singapore's free-trade agreements — all sit at different points on the Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty schedule, and that schedule is a large part of why your borrower needed you instead of a bank in the first place: a foreign buyer at 60% ABSD or an entity buyer at 65% has a cash gap a bank mortgage alone rarely closes.

A lender who is also a Singapore Citizen or PR and licenses as an individual moneylender is capped at the same 4%-a-month ceiling regardless of who the borrower is. A lender operating through a fund or an excluded-moneylender structure faces no such cap — the rate is whatever the fund's own documents and the borrower's own negotiation produce, which is part of why the bridging and caveat-loan rates quoted later on this page run so much lower, in annual terms, than the moneylender ceiling.

Taxes: what you owe on the interest, and what your borrower owes on the property

IRAS taxes your interest income differently depending on whether lending is your business. Where you are in the business of moneylending, interest is taxable under section 10(1)(a) of the Income Tax Act on an accrual basis — you are taxed on interest as it accrues, whether or not it has actually been paid to you yet. Where lending is not your business — a one-off private loan, or your slice of a fund's income — interest is taxed on a contractual or coupon basis under section 10(1)(d), as it falls due under the loan's own terms. The distinction is not cosmetic: a licensed moneylender running a book of loans is taxed on an accrual basis across the whole book; an individual writing one bridging loan is taxed as each coupon comes due.

The property you are lending against carries its own tax stack, and you need to know it because it is the first claim ahead of yours if the deal goes wrong. Buyer's Stamp Duty on a residential purchase runs 1% on the first $180,000, 2% on the next $180,000, 3% on the next $640,000, 4% on the next $500,000, 5% on the next $1,500,000, and 6% on anything above $3,000,000 — S$69,600 on a S$2,000,000 purchase.

Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty sits on top of that, and it is what actually drives demand for your capital: a Singapore Citizen pays nothing on a first home, 20% on a second, 30% on a third; a Permanent Resident pays 5%, 30%, 35%; a foreigner pays a flat 60%; an entity or a trust pays 65%. A borrower buying a second or third property, or buying through a company or a trust, is carrying a duty bill that can exceed the property's own downpayment — precisely the cash gap a bridging loan, a caveat loan, or your capital is there to close.

Seller's Stamp Duty is the exit-side tax to price into any loan with a horizon inside four years: 16% if the property is sold within a year of purchase, 12% in year two, 8% in year three, 4% in year four, nothing after. If your loan is short-dated bridging that closes before a sale completes, this rarely touches you directly — but if your exit plan relies on the borrower selling the collateral to repay you, and that sale falls inside their own four-year holding period, SSD comes off the top of the sale proceeds before your loan does.

Borrowing: why the bank said no, and what that is worth to you

The regulatory gap you are pricing is specific and namable. MAS's Total Debt Servicing Ratio framework — 55% of gross monthly income, stress-tested at a 4% floor rate — binds full banks, finance companies and merchant banks. MAS's own TDSR page lists exactly those three institution types and no others. A licensed moneylender, an excluded moneylender, or a fund's lending vehicle is not on that list. Your borrower did not necessarily fail TDSR because they cannot afford the property — they may fail it because their income is commission-based, foreign-currency, or newly self-employed, all of which the bank's haircut treats harshly, or because they are a company, which TDSR does not touch at all but which every bank still underwrites conservatively.

Even inside the banking system there is a carve-out you are effectively competing with: a bridging loan repaid within six months is exempt from TDSR entirely. That is one reason bank bridging is priced so much cheaper than yours — it is not fighting the same 55% ceiling your borrower's main mortgage is. Your capital gets called in precisely where that six-month exemption does not reach: longer bridges, borrowers a bank bridge desk declines, or gaps a bank's own stress test will not clear.

Pricing itself is inconsistent across the lenders who publish anything at all. One non-bank lender's own page quotes a bridging rate 'from ~6-7%' and 6-8% a year, interest-only, at 65-70% loan-to-value on a first charge, loan sizes from S$500,000, two to four weeks from mandate to drawdown. Market-wide, private bridging is reported at roughly 6% to 9% a year against 4% to 6% for bank bridging. A second product entirely — a caveat or short second-charge loan — is quoted by different lenders in different units and different orders of magnitude: one at 2% to 3% a month (24% to 36% a year, simple), another at 6% to 8% a year for what may be a different structure. I have not reconciled these, and neither should you without asking each lender directly which product, which charge ranking, and which unit their number is stated in.

The licensed-moneylender channel is capped by law, not by market competition: a maximum of 4% a month interest, secured or unsecured, an administrative fee of up to 10% of principal deducted at disbursement, a late fee of up to S$60 a month, and total charges across the life of the loan that can never exceed the principal itself. Unlike the unsecured lending most people associate with a licensed moneylender, a secured loan against property carries no amount ceiling at all — the income-linked limits apply only to unsecured lending.

Put a number on the spread between channels. S$300,000 borrowed for 12 months costs about S$18,000 at a 6%-a-year non-bank bridging rate, S$24,000 at 8% a year, roughly S$4,200 at a 1.40% bank rate — and, at the licensed-moneylender ceiling, S$72,000 at 2% a month or S$144,000 at 4% a month, plus a possible S$30,000 administrative fee, for totals of S$102,000 (34% of principal) and S$174,000 (58%), both still under the moneylender total-charges cap of 100% of principal. The moneylender channel is not a cheaper version of the same product — it is priced for borrowers no other channel will touch at all, and your return as that lender is compensation for exactly that.

Your own carry runs the other way from your borrower's. Where they see a cost, you see the same number as income: on a S$1,000,000 property financed at a 6%-a-year private rate, the borrower's shortfall against a 3.36% gross rental yield is your S$42,000 of annual interest income — most of it the spread between what you charge and what a bank would have charged if it had said yes.

Two brokers' own pages describe the underwriting philosophy that makes this channel exist at all: one states plainly that it ignores the 55% TDSR cap and does not treat a prior bank rejection as disqualifying, underwriting instead on bank-statement deposits, business revenue and cash flow; another states that banks decline on income structure, age, credit history and existing commitments, while private lenders 'focus on property value rather than payslips.' That is the product you are underwriting when you fund this channel: not a borrower's income, but the collateral's value and your own exit if they cannot pay.

Reno, A&A and rebuild: financing the property itself

Private credit fills a construction-finance gap the same way it fills a purchase-finance one. A bank construction loan draws in stages against certified progress, with interest charged only on what has been drawn, but banks cap a land loan at roughly 50-55% loan-to-value against 75% for a completed home, and CPF use is restricted until a home actually stands on the land — a cash gap on a S$5,000,000 plot that can run into the millions before a single wall goes up. Where a bank will not bridge that gap, or will not bridge it fast enough for a build already underway, your capital does the same job a bank construction loan does, priced for speed and the borrower's inability to wait, not for lower risk.

Conveyancing: how your position actually gets secured

Your loan is only as good as the charge behind it. A private lender's own published terms describe a first-charge mortgage, registered the same way a bank's would be, at loan-to-value ratios of 65-70% and two to four weeks from mandate to drawdown — slower than the marketing implies once legal work, valuation and charge registration are counted. A caveat or second-charge loan is faster and looser: a lender's own page describes it as short-term, one to twelve months, ranking behind the existing mortgage, with speed and light documentation the explicit selling point over security quality.

That ranking matters to you as much as it does to your borrower. MinLaw's own guidance to borrowers warns that once a caveat is lodged against a mortgaged property, the property cannot be sold without repaying the loan in full — useful leverage for you as the caveat-holder, but it also means your claim sits behind whatever first mortgage already exists, and a shortfall on a forced sale is absorbed by the second-charge holder first, which in this structure is you.

None of the private lenders whose own pages this page draws on disclose their arrangement fee, legal cost allocation, default-interest rate, or prepayment terms. That is not an oversight — it is the part of the product that is negotiated bilaterally, deal by deal, and it is the first thing to get in writing before you commit capital, not the last.

Estate: what a private credit position looks like when someone dies

The estate side of this market is a gap private credit fills that a bank simply will not. No Singapore bank bridges an executor over the gap before a grant of probate or letters of administration — a routine wait of two to three months on top of HDB's own eight-to-ten-week resale process, during which an estate can owe property tax, MCST arrears, or funeral costs it has no liquid cash to pay. A private lender's published rate of 6-8% a year, applied to a S$50,000 gap over five months, costs roughly S$1,460 to S$1,670 in interest — a fraction of what the same gap would cost at a licensed moneylender's rate cap, though no route is confirmed to actually work against an unprobated estate: no bank product for this gap was found, the private lender's own terms don't say whether it lends before a grant of probate, and a licensed moneylender's willingness to lend against an asset the executor does not yet hold title to is likewise unconfirmed.

You can only be repaid once the estate actually has the authority to pay you: a Grant of Probate requires a valid will naming an executor, and Letters of Administration are the route where none exists. Underwriting a loan against an unprobated estate means underwriting the probate process itself, not just the property. [⚠ estate.probate.eligibility_2026_06_15: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

The other direction matters too. A loan you have written, or a unit in a private credit fund you hold, is itself an asset in your own estate — illiquid, hard to value on a snapshot date, and subject to the same lock-up and redemption gate that made the fund attractive to you while you were alive. An executor who does not know your book of private loans exists cannot collect on it; naming it explicitly, with the loan documents, matters here exactly as it does for any other asset that does not sit in a bank account.

The twelve questions, from the lender's chair

Borrow/private-credit asks these same twelve questions of the person taking the loan. Flip the table and they still apply — but Q1 and Q2, the two that sort a reader, point differently for you. Q1 is not 'are you borrowing to buy the property' — you are not buying the property at all. It is: are you funding this lending with your own free capital, or are you yourself leveraged — borrowing against your own portfolio, or lending through a fund that itself uses gearing — to do it? Q2 is not 'are you letting the property out' — the whole trade is lending it out, definitionally. It is: once you have made the loan, do you hold it to maturity, or is your position itself something you can exit early, sell, or redeem?

• Own capital, hold to maturity — the plain carry trade: you collect the spread, with no funding cost of your own to service
• Own capital, can exit early — the same carry, plus the option to get out, usually at a haircut a fund's redemption gate or a loan sale imposes
• Borrowed capital, hold to maturity — leveraged carry: your spread is now the gap between what you charge and what you yourself pay to fund it, and that gap can go negative if your own funding cost rises
• Borrowed capital, can exit early — leveraged and liquidity-seeking at once, the cell where a funding-cost shock and a redemption request can hit you in the same week

C0 THE PLAY. This is a cash-flow play, not a balance-sheet appreciation play. You are not betting the collateral rises in value — you are being paid a coupon for taking a risk a bank declined. The property's own price movement matters to you only as a floor under your recovery if it goes wrong.

C1 BALANCE SHEET. What you own is a claim: a loan receivable, or a unit in a fund that holds a book of such claims, secured by a charge over someone else's property. What you owe is whatever you borrowed, if anything, to fund the position. The property itself never sits on your balance sheet unless you end up owning it after a forced sale.

C2 CASH FLOW. Interest comes in monthly or is retained and paid in a bullet at maturity, depending on the structure; your own funding cost, if any, goes out on its own schedule. The funding gap to watch is not the borrower's — it is yours, if your own cost of capital reprices faster than your loan book does.

C3 P&L. Interest income is profit as it accrues or as it falls due, per the tax treatment above — profit and cash are not the same thing here any more than anywhere else. A retained-interest bridging loan can show profit on your books for months before a cent of it is actually cash in hand.

C4 CARRY. Positive by construction, and that is the entire point of being the lender rather than the borrower: the S$42,000 that was the borrower's shortfall on the worked example above is your income, not your cost.

C5 GIVE/GET. You give up the use of your own capital for the loan's term, and you take on the borrower's default risk and the collateral's liquidity risk. You get the interest rate, in exchange.

C6 EXPOSED TO. Borrower default, collateral value falling below your charge amount, and — if you are in a fund — the fund's own valuation discipline. MAS's own 2026 inspection findings recorded a manager that reclassified restructured non-performing loans as performing without a valuation adjustment, overstating NAV and overpaying its own management fees off an inflated number. You are exposed to your manager's honesty about its own book, not only to the borrowers in it.

C7 FOR HOW LONG. A bridging loan runs six to twenty-four months; a fund allocation is typically closed-ended with a multi-year lock-up written into the fund documents. Either way, this is not overnight money.

C8 FAILURE CASCADE. A borrower missing a payment is negative carry for you the moment it happens — you stop receiving what you were owed while your own funding cost, if you have one, keeps running. That hits your cash flow immediately, accumulates into your P&L as an impaired asset, and if the collateral's forced-sale value comes in below your charge amount, it becomes a realised loss — the lender's version of negative equity. Enough of that across a loan book is the illiquidity and insolvency at the end of the same cascade the borrower faces, just triggered from the other side of the same instrument.

C9 LIQUIDITY. A direct loan is illiquid until it is repaid or you sell the receivable to someone else at whatever discount that buyer demands. A fund unit is liquid only on the fund's own redemption schedule, through whatever gate is written into its documents — not on demand, and not at a market price you can check daily.

C10 CONTROL. You are not a price-taker the way an investor watching a public bond screen is — you set your own rate, your own loan-to-value, and your own covenants deal by deal, or your manager does it on your behalf inside the fund's mandate. That is real control at the point of underwriting. It disappears the moment the loan is made: from then on you are watching the same property-market and borrower-specific risks as everyone else, with no further lever to pull short of default and enforcement.

C11 THE EXIT. Repayment at maturity is the clean exit. The unclean one is enforcement: a caveat that blocks a sale until you are repaid, or, at the far end, forcing a sale of the collateral yourself — a process with its own time and legal cost, which comes out of your recovery before it reaches your return.

Who you actually work with

A broker sits between you and the borrower on almost every direct deal. Devise Singapore says outright that it is not a lender itself and works with more than twenty lenders; Global Mortgage Group and Greystone Advisory publish their own terms as one lender among several a broker can route a deal to. None of the three discloses what it earns from you, from the borrower, or from both — that fee sits inside the spread you are quoted, not beside it, and it is worth asking directly before you fund anything through a broker rather than assuming the rate you see is the rate the borrower actually pays or the rate you actually keep.

A lawyer drafts and registers your charge, and should be engaged by you independently of whoever introduced the deal, not shared with the borrower or the broker. A fund route replaces the broker with a Licensed Fund Management Company, whose fee is the management and performance fee structure set out in the fund's own documents — read those before the accredited-investor threshold, not after.

What the property agent earns, and where that points

CEA sets no fixed or prescribed commission on any property transaction. A seller's agent working a resale that a private-credit-funded buyer completes earns whatever was negotiated — commonly around 2%, or S$40,000 on a S$2,000,000 sale — if the sale completes, and nothing if it does not. The agent has no stake in which lender the buyer used, and no fee that turns on your capital specifically, unless the agent also acts as an introducer to a broker or lender, in which case a referral fee changes the picture entirely: an agent who is paid for the introduction has a reason to steer a client toward whichever lender pays the referral, not necessarily the cheapest one, and CEA's own rules require that conflict of interest to be declared.

MAS and CEA's own joint letter of 16 December 2025 states plainly why an agent cannot go further and start advising on the loan itself: property agents are prohibited from acting as financial advisory representatives under the Financial Advisers Act, precisely so an agent is never incentivised to recommend a higher-commission product over one that actually fits the client — including steering a buyer toward a private lender who pays a referral fee over a cheaper bank loan that pays the agent nothing at all. Any yield or price-appreciation claim an agent makes must be backed by verifiable comparable-transaction data, not by the fact that a particular lender is easier for the agent to get paid through.

Where to go from here