Buying a new launch

Researched and written 2026-09-29 14:27 SGT · 8 sources listed at the end · draft 1 · figures verified against the named sources on the date shown; where a source has since moved, the element carries a marker.

A new launch is a private residential unit you buy off-plan, before or during construction — a building under construction, BUC in the shorthand everyone in the trade uses. You are not buying a finished thing. You are buying a claim on a thing that does not exist yet, paid for in instalments pegged to how much of it has been built, and that one fact — progressive payment — is what makes this a different transaction from a resale purchase in almost every respect: what you owe and when, how your loan is drawn, how much interest you actually pay in year one versus year three, and what your cash flow looks like while you wait. This page answers the question a BUC buyer actually has: how does progressive payment work, and what will I owe, at each stage, from the day I sign the option to the day I collect the keys.

The mechanics: how progressive payment actually runs

A licensed developer sells under the Sale of Balance Units or direct-launch process governed by the Housing Developers (Control and Licensing) Act, and every sale runs through a Project Account the developer can draw from only for that project's own costs — a purchaser-protection mechanism, not a courtesy. You do not pay the price in one sum. You pay it in the ten tranches fixed by the standard form Sale and Purchase Agreement, each tranche triggered by a construction milestone the developer certifies, not by a date on a calendar.

• Booking (Option to Purchase) — 5% of the price, in cash
• Signing the Sale and Purchase Agreement, within 3 weeks of the option — a further 15%, bringing cash-or-CPF paid to 20%
• Foundation work completed — 10%
• Reinforced concrete framework completed — 10%
• Partition walls (brick or block) completed — 5%
• Roofing and ceiling completed — 5%
• Door and window frames, plus electrical wiring and plumbing (without fittings) — 5%
• Car parks, roads and drains serving the unit — 5%
• Temporary Occupation Permit (TOP) — 25%
• Certificate of Statutory Completion (CSC) and legal completion — 15%

That schedule sums to 100% and is the one fixed by the Housing Developers Rules; it is what every standard-form BUC agreement in Singapore actually contains. You will see other splits quoted online — some guides show the last two tranches as different percentages, or add an intermediate structural stage — and those differences are real disagreements between commercial guides, not alternate legal schedules; the contract in your hand governs, and it will match the schedule above unless your solicitor flags otherwise.

The booking fee — 5% of price — is paid in cash, always, at the option stage; it cannot be paid from CPF because CPF has no charge over the property yet. From the SPA-signing tranche onward, payment can come from cash or CPF Ordinary Account, or a combination, and the order in practice is cash first, then CPF, then the bank loan, because the bank's disbursement only starts once its mortgage is registered and CPF's own charge lodged.

This produces the single fact that most first-time BUC buyers get wrong about what they will owe: your loan is disbursed in slices, matching each construction milestone, and interest is charged only on what has actually been drawn down — not on the full loan amount from day one. A S$1.5m loan sitting at 20% disbursed after SPA signing is accruing interest on S$300,000, not S$1.5m. Your instalment is small in year one and climbs, sometimes sharply, through the roofing, electrical and car-park stages, then jumps again at TOP when the single largest tranche, 25% of the price, is drawn at once. [⚠ buc.pps.interest_on_drawn_only: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

The whole run, booking to CSC, typically takes three to four years: roughly 24 to 36 months of construction to TOP, then up to a further 12 months to CSC and full legal completion. Keys are usually collected at or shortly after TOP, not CSC; the 12-month Defects Liability Period runs from key collection or the Vacant Possession Date, whichever is earlier, and the developer is obliged to rectify defects notified within that window.

One clock nobody flags in advance: the Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty six-month refund clock for a replacement property, where it applies, runs from TOP or CSC — whichever is earlier — not from the option or the SPA, and not from when you paid the duty. On a new launch that can put three to four years between paying ABSD and that clock even starting. If you are buying a BUC as your replacement home while planning to sell an existing property for an ABSD refund, plan your sale around the TOP date, not the purchase date.

Eligibility

There is no income ceiling, no occupation quota and no ethnic integration policy on a private new launch — those constraints belong to HDB and EC purchases, not condominiums. What actually gates you is citizenship (below), the standard Options to Purchase timeline (a 3-week option period, extendable only by developer agreement), and financing: whether your income, existing debt and the number of housing loans you already carry clear TDSR and the bank's own credit assessment. A Singapore PR who already owns a private property, or a household holding any private residential interest, faces no eligibility bar here the way an HDB purchase would — the constraint on a new launch is entirely tax and financing, not quota.

Citizenship status: what you pay to buy depends on who you are

A Singapore Citizen buying a first residential property pays no Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty. A second property costs 20%, a third or subsequent property 30%. A Singapore Permanent Resident pays 5% on a first property, 30% on a second, 35% on a third. A foreigner buying any residential property, first or otherwise, pays a flat 60%. An entity — a company, society or other non-individual — pays 65% regardless of how many properties it already holds.

One carve-out changes the arithmetic for a specific set of foreign buyers: nationals of the United States, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland are taxed as if they were Singapore Citizens, under the free trade agreements Singapore holds with those states. This is nationality-based, not residence-based — a US green card holder who is not a US national does not qualify, and permanent-resident status in one of the EFTA states is treated the same as the underlying nationality. The remission has to be actively applied for through myTax Portal; it is not automatic at the point of purchase.

On a S$2,000,000 new-launch unit, that spread is the difference between paying nothing extra (SC, first home), S$100,000 (PR, first home), S$1,200,000 (foreigner) and S$1,300,000 (a company). ABSD is due within 14 days of exercising the option — on a new launch, that means within 14 days of the OTP being granted, well before construction has started, and penalties of up to four times the duty owed apply if it is paid late.

Taxes across the hold: stamp duty, seller's duty, property tax, rental income

Buyer's Stamp Duty is charged on every purchase regardless of citizenship, on a marginal schedule: 1% on the first S$180,000, 2% on the next S$180,000, 3% on the next S$640,000, 4% on the next S$500,000, 5% on the next S$1,500,000, and 6% on anything above S$3,000,000. On a S$1,800,000 new launch that works out to roughly S$59,600. BSD, like ABSD, is payable within 14 days of exercising the option — on the OTP, not on completion — so both duties are due while the building is still a foundation.

Seller's Stamp Duty applies if you sell within four years of purchase, on a schedule of 16% in year one, 12% in year two, 8% in year three and 4% in year four, nil after. For a BUC purchase the SSD clock starts from the date you sign the Sale and Purchase Agreement — not from TOP and not from legal completion — so on a project taking three to four years to complete, you can find yourself still inside the SSD window on the day you collect your keys, with the four-year clock already most of the way spent by the time the unit is even livable. Anyone planning to flip a new launch at or shortly after TOP needs to check this date, not assume the clock only starts once the unit exists.

Property tax does not begin to bite until the unit exists and is assessed with an Annual Value — there is nothing to tax on a hole in the ground. Once TOP is granted and the unit is assessed, an owner-occupied home is taxed on a progressive schedule from 0% on the first S$12,000 of Annual Value up to 32% above S$140,000; a unit you let out, or a second home you don't occupy, is taxed on the steeper non-owner-occupier schedule, 12% up to S$30,000 of AV rising to 36% above S$60,000. Owner-occupier rates apply to only one property at a time.

Rental income, once the unit is complete and let, is taxed as ordinary income under the Income Tax Act, at your personal marginal rate after deducting allowable expenses (mortgage interest, property tax, agent's commission, repairs). There is no special new-launch treatment here — the rules are identical to a resale unit's rental income once both are producing rent; the only new-launch-specific point is that there is no rental income at all until TOP, so a rental-yield underwrite done at booking is a three-to-four-year-forward bet, not a current-year fact.

Borrowing: LTV, TDSR, MSR, and how a BUC loan actually behaves

For an individual borrower with no other home loan, the bank will lend up to 75% loan-to-value on a private new launch, falling to 55% where the loan tenure runs long relative to your age. A second outstanding housing loan drops the ceiling to 45% LTV (25% where tenure is long), with a minimum 25% of the price required in cash on that second loan specifically. These MAS-set ceilings apply identically to a new launch and a resale unit — the LTV rule does not change because the property is BUC.

Total Debt Servicing Ratio caps all your property-loan repayments, this one included, at 55% of gross monthly income, and MAS requires banks to stress-test that calculation at a 4% floor rate — not the rate you are actually quoted — so the loan you can service on paper is smaller than the instalment you would pay if today's rate held for the life of the loan. Mortgage Servicing Ratio, the tighter 30% ceiling, applies only to HDB flats and executive condominiums during the minimum occupation period; it does not apply to a private new-launch condo at all. If you are comparing a new-launch condo against an EC on affordability, this is the material difference: the EC is MSR-capped, the condo is not.

There is no HDB loan option for a private new launch — the HDB concessionary loan exists only for HDB flats, so BUC financing is a bank loan or nothing. Every bank BUC package on the market today is floating-rate for at least the first two to three years, typically 3-month SORA plus a 0.20-0.25 percentage-point spread; fixed-rate packages simply are not offered on a BUC loan and only become available once the unit reaches TOP. This matters for the failure-cascade thinking below: for the full construction period, you carry rate risk with no fixed-rate escape hatch, and only get the option to lock in a rate once the building exists. [⚠ buc.loan.fixed_available: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Reno, A&A and control — where it fits on a new launch

A new launch hands you a bare, brand-new shell — this is the one buy-side product on this site where major addition-and-alteration or rebuild simply does not apply; you are not modifying an existing structure, you are fitting out a new one. Your control lever here is the developer's own optional add-on schemes (premium finishes, layout variants offered pre-launch) and, after TOP, ordinary interior renovation — which CPF explicitly does not fund; a renovation loan has to come from a bank, separate from your housing loan. The defects liability period is your other lever: use the 12 months from key collection to have the developer rectify at no cost to you, before undertaking any renovation that would obscure a defect.

Conveyancing on a new launch

The Sale and Purchase Agreement is a standard form fixed by the Housing Developers Rules — unlike a resale purchase, there is no negotiation over the contract's core terms, only over which unit, which price and which optional extras. Your lawyer's job on a new launch is narrower than on a resale: checking the SPA schedule matches the payment stages above, handling your CPF and bank disbursement instructions at each milestone, and managing the mortgage registration once your loan begins drawing down. Private conveyancing typically runs S$2,000 to S$5,000 all-in for a private purchase, covering purchase and mortgage-side work, CPF administration, stamp duty handling and disbursements; there is no government-set fee schedule for private conveyancing, so quotes vary and are worth comparing on the same defined scope of work rather than by headline total.

Because BSD and ABSD are both due within 14 days of the option — months or years before your bank loan starts disbursing — most buyers pay both duties upfront in cash, then apply for CPF reimbursement once a CPF charge is lodged on the property; CPF cannot disburse before its own charge is registered, so the cash-first sequence is procedural, not optional. Budget the full ABSD amount in cash at exercise, even if you intend to use CPF for it eventually.

Estate: what a three-to-four-year purchase means if you don't live to see TOP

Because a new launch takes years to complete, the ordinary estate questions apply with extra force: if you die before TOP, your interest in the SPA — a contractual right to a unit that does not yet exist, plus whatever tranches you've already paid — passes according to how you hold the purchase, not automatically to anyone. Property held in joint tenancy (the common structure for a married couple buying together) passes automatically and in full to the surviving owner, outside the will and outside probate; property held as tenants-in-common, or bought solely, falls into the estate and is distributed under the will or, with no will, under the rules of intestacy. A foreign co-buyer who is a surviving joint tenant is exempt from the Residential Property Act's inheritance restriction on landed property, but that exemption does not extend to a tenant-in-common or a beneficiary under a will — the manner in which you and your co-buyer hold the SPA, decided at the point of signing, is the decision that matters here, not something to leave until later.

A property inherited under a will or intestacy carries no acquisition duty of its own, but it counts as a property the beneficiary owns for ABSD purposes on any future purchase — including a future new launch the beneficiary might want to buy. If you already hold one property and stand to inherit a second, factor that inherited unit into your own next-purchase ABSD tier before you commit to another BUC.

The voice: what this actually is, in plain terms

Two questions sort every buyer here, and neither of them is "are you buying to invest or to live in it" — nobody buys believing the price will fall, so that question sorts nobody. The two that matter: are you borrowing to buy, and once you hold it, are you lending it out (letting it) or keeping it for your own use? Those two answers cross into four positions. Cash, own-use: pure appreciation play, no carry, no financing risk. Cash, let-out: a yield play, positive carry by construction, since there is no interest bill eating the rent. Borrow, own-use: negative carry by construction — most owner-occupiers sit here, and few say it out loud, because the mortgage costs more than the imputed rent you save. Borrow, let-out: the spread play — the whole game is whether rent clears the interest bill, and by how much.

C0, the play: on a new launch specifically, this is overwhelmingly a balance-sheet play for the first three to four years — you are accumulating an asset and a liability that both grow in fixed steps, and there is no cash flow to speak of (no rent, because there's no completed unit) until TOP. C1, balance sheet: each progressive-payment tranche simultaneously increases what you own (equity paid into the unit) and, once your loan starts disbursing, what you owe (the drawn loan balance) — the two move together, tranche by tranche. C2, cash flow: what actually leaves your account is lumpy, not smooth — a large cash-and-CPF outlay at booking and SPA signing, then small loan instalments that step up at each construction milestone, then a large jump at TOP when the 25% tranche is drawn and, if you're renting elsewhere while you wait, your total housing cost briefly doubles (rent plus new instalment) before you move in. C3, P&L: on paper, a new launch produces no profit and no loss during construction at all — there is no income statement here, because there is no income, only a growing asset and a growing loan. Do not read a rising valuation on caveats of similar completed units nearby as "profit" — it is unrealised, and C1 (balance sheet) is not C3 (P&L).

C4, carry: zero or negative throughout construction, because there is no rent to receive against a loan that is progressively drawn and progressively charging interest — the carry question only starts to have a real answer at TOP, once the unit exists and can be let, or once you move in and stop paying rent elsewhere. C5, give/get: what you give is capital committed years ahead of use, exposure to construction and market risk over a multi-year horizon, and ABSD paid upfront long before the asset exists; what you get is a brand-new unit, typically at a price set before completion premiums are visible in the resale market, plus the option-stage entry price that a resale buyer of the same project won't get once it's built.

C6, exposed to: interest rates for the full construction period, since every BUC loan is floating with no fixed-rate escape hatch until TOP; the developer's own execution and completion timeline, since a delay pushes back your income (if letting) and your move-in (if living in it) without reducing what you owe; and the resale and rental market at completion, three to four years from now, which nobody can see today. C7, for how long: the commitment horizon is not the loan tenure, it's booking to TOP — typically three to four years — before the asset does anything but consume cash and accrue debt; only after that does the normal holding-period clock (SSD's four years, MOP if it ever applied) start to matter in the way it does for a resale purchase.

C8, the failure cascade, in the order it actually happens: rates rise on your floating BUC loan while you're still mid-construction, drawing negative carry deeper than planned — that hits cash flow first, as instalments step up faster than income does — sustained negative cash flow accumulates into the P&L only once the unit is producing rent and the numbers are finally comparable — if the shortfall persists, it erodes equity and can tip into negative equity if the completed unit values below what you've paid and borrowed — negative equity plus an inability to service the loan becomes illiquidity, because you cannot sell a property that's worth less than the debt on it without bringing cash to the table — illiquidity sustained without a buffer becomes insolvency. Each stage is a different problem with a different fix; conflating them is how people get caught mid-cascade with no exit.

C9, liquidity: a BUC purchase is close to illiquid for its entire construction life — you cannot sell a unit that doesn't legally and practically exist yet in the way a completed resale unit can be sold, and even once TOP is granted, exiting inside the four-year SSD window (which, remember, started at SPA signing, not TOP) costs 16% down to 4% of price. This is one of the least liquid positions on this entire site during the years it takes to build. C10, control: you have almost none over the build — you cannot accelerate TOP, cannot change the payment schedule, cannot avoid a developer delay. Your only real control lever, as noted above, is the fit-out and finishing choices offered pre-completion, and post-TOP renovation; this is a page where control is genuinely thin, and that thinness is itself the thing to price in before committing. C11, the exit: before TOP, exiting means assigning or subsaling the OTP or SPA itself (restricted, and rare in practice for most schemes); after TOP but inside four years, exiting means paying SSD on the way out; after four years, a normal resale, at whatever the market has done to comparable completed units by then — which is the entire bet a new-launch buyer is making and cannot see the answer to at the point of signing.

The B2B route: buying a new launch through a company

A company, trust or other entity buying a private new launch pays ABSD at 65% regardless of how many properties it already holds or doesn't, and financing collapses to a 15% loan-to-value ceiling from most banks — a company is not assessed on TDSR the way an individual is, and lenders treat a residential purchase by a corporate vehicle as materially higher risk. On a S$2,000,000 unit, that means roughly S$1,300,000 in ABSD alone, a loan capped near S$300,000, and total cash committed of about 153% of the purchase price before BSD and any construction-stage costs. For almost every use case this makes a corporate structure uneconomic for a BUC purchase intended as a family home or a straightforward rental — MAS looks through a shell entity for exactly this reason, and the tax and financing settings are built to make the individual route the default, not an oversight to route around.

Where a corporate structure on a new launch does make sense is narrow: a development or investment vehicle intending to hold multiple units at scale, where the 65% ABSD and 15% LTV are underwritten into the deal from the outset as a cost of the structure rather than discovered afterward, or a family office consolidating holdings for estate and succession reasons unrelated to leverage. If a company purchase is being proposed to you as a way to sidestep an individual's ABSD tier, the arithmetic above is the reason to ask precisely what problem the structure is solving, because on pure cost it rarely beats buying in your own name and paying the personal-tier ABSD instead.

What the realtor earns, and where the incentive points

On a new launch, the developer pays your agent — typically 2% to 3% of the purchase price — and you, the buyer, pay nothing directly. This is structurally different from a resale purchase, where the seller usually pays 2% and any buyer's-agent share is co-broked out of that. It means an agent showing you new launches is being paid by the very party whose price you are trying to negotiate down, and paid more, in absolute terms, the higher that price is. That is not an accusation of dishonesty — CEA bars an agent from representing both sides of one transaction and requires declared, documented commission — but the structural fact stands: the agent's fee scales with your purchase price and is funded by the seller's side, which is a genuine conflict worth naming rather than assuming away.

The same incentive can point against the agent's own income in one specific way: a new launch that closes quickly, at or near list price, pays the agent faster and with less work than walking a client through a resale negotiation, a BUC-versus-resale comparison, or a decision not to buy at all this cycle. An agent who steers every client toward whatever new launch is currently marketing hardest — rather than toward the product, resale or BUC, that actually fits that client's borrowing capacity and timeline — is optimising for their own commission cycle, not the client's balance sheet. Ask directly what the agent is paid on the specific unit you're being shown, and ask whether they've shown you the resale alternative in the same project or area before you sign.

What is uncertain

• The exact final-tranche split (TOP 25% / CSC 15%, versus other splits reported by some commercial guides) is contract-specific — the SPA you sign governs, not any guide including this one
• When the ABSD six-month replacement-property clock starts for a BUC purchase (TOP or CSC, whichever is earlier) is well-sourced, but IRAS's own live page could not be independently re-confirmed this run
• MSR's non-application to private new-launch condos is drawn from MAS's own TDSR/MSR scope page and is solid, but always confirm against the specific bank's current package terms, since packages change

Sources

• URA — Housing Developers Rules (Cap. 130, R 1) and Housing Developers (Project Account) Rules (2026-04-17) · https://www.ura.gov.sg
• IRAS — Buyer's Stamp Duty, Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty and Seller's Stamp Duty schedules (2025-07-04) · https://www.iras.gov.sg
• MAS — Total Debt Servicing Ratio, Mortgage Servicing Ratio and Loan-to-Value rules for residential property loans (2022-09-29) · https://www.mas.gov.sg
• CPF Board — Use of CPF for private property purchase and progressive payment (2026-07-06) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg
• CEA — Commission and conduct rules for property agents (2026-05-13) · https://www.cea.gov.sg
• SLA — Manner of holding: joint tenancy and tenancy-in-common (2026-09-29) · https://www.sla.gov.sg
• PropKaki — Progressive payment schedule for a building-under-construction purchase (2026-09-29) · https://propkaki.com
• PropertyNet.SG — BUC home loan packages and market spreads (2026-09-04) · https://propertynet.sg