Selling

Researched and written 2026-09-29 14:34 SGT · 16 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.

What you walk away with is not the price. It is the price, less what you still owe the lender, less what you must hand back to your own CPF account, less the duty and fees on the way out. Four gates decide that number, and they come in a fixed order: the minimum occupation period (MOP) if the home is an HDB flat, the seller's duty window if it is private, the CPF refund, and only then net proceeds. This page walks the gates in that order and ends with worked examples. The examples are my arithmetic on ledger figures with invented inputs; they are not quotes.

Where a number here came from a page I opened this run, the page is named inline with its date. Where a page would not render, or I could only see a search excerpt, the sentence says so and the last section lists every gap. Nothing below is advice on your particular flat or house. It is a map of the rules and of the incentives around you.

The mechanics: what selling actually is

Selling a Singapore home is two things at once: a contract, and a series of government and lender gates that the contract has to pass through. The contract is an option to purchase (OTP) followed by a sale and purchase. The gates are the ones that move money: who takes the first cut of the price, who gets refunded, and who is allowed to buy.

The HDB sequence

HDB's own process page for sellers (Application Process for Sale of Flat, HDB, undated; read 29 September 2026) runs: intent to sell, the buyer exercises the OTP, seller and buyer submit the resale application, HDB approves, and there is a completion appointment. Only HDB's prescribed OTP is valid, and each copy carries a unique serial number. The option fee at granting is between S$1 and S$1,000, and the option exercise fee brings the payment up to the amount agreed. HDB's option period is 21 days. Seller and buyer must each submit their part of the resale application within 7 calendar days of the OTP being exercised, or the application is cancelled with no refund. If HDB is handling the sale rather than a lawyer, the seller's bank account details are due within 3 calendar days of submitting the application. There is a 7-day cooling-off period. HDB says completion is about 8 weeks after it accepts the application, and the refund into your CPF account is arranged within 7 to 14 working days of the completion appointment.

Practically, from your first viewing to the day the cheque is in your hand is a matter of months. One law firm's guide puts a whole upgrade, sale side included, at around 60 weeks end to end when you count the marketing, the buyer's financing and the second purchase. That figure is a single law firm's; treat it as a worst case, not a plan.

The private sequence

A resale condo or landed house follows the market convention rather than an HDB form. Market guides put the option fee at about 1% of the price, another 4% on exercise, a 14-day option validity, and completion about 8 weeks later, or 10 to 12 weeks where the buyer has a mortgage. The OTP is not the sale: while it is live you cannot sell to someone else, and the buyer can walk away by forfeiting the option fee. The date on that option matters twice over: as I read the IRAS FAQ below, it is also the date your seller's stamp duty clock stops.

A new-launch or developer sale is a different animal with progressive payments; that is a buyer's page, not this one. If you are selling a unit you bought new and have not yet completed, that is a sub-sale with its own rules; ask a lawyer before you market it. I have not researched sub-sales for this page.

Eligibility: the first gate

For HDB, the gate is MOP. HDB's Eligibility for Selling a Flat page (read 29 September 2026) says the MOP is the period you must physically reside in the flat, and that the sale must also fit within the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) quota for the block and neighbourhood and, where it applies, the Singapore PR quota. It adds that bankruptcy and divorce carry their own additional requirements. HDB's search-result text gives the MOP as 5 years from the date of purchase or resale completion for subsidised flats and for resale flats bought with the CPF Housing Grant, and no occupation period for a 1-room flat. Flats bought from HDB as Plus or Prime carry 10 years. If you are near the line, ask HDB; do not count on a calendar.

The EIP and SPR quotas are not about you. They are about your buyer. HDB updates them on the 1st of each month. A block that has hit its quota for a given ethnic group, or for PRs, means the pool of eligible buyers for your flat is smaller than the market's, and a smaller pool is a lower price or a longer wait. Nobody can tell you that from an advertisement; your agent can look it up, and you should ask them to, before you set your asking price.

Plus and Prime flats have a second lever: on selling a flat bought from HDB under these classes, a percentage of the resale proceeds goes back to HDB as subsidy recovery. HDB states the mechanism; the percentages I have come from a news report, not HDB, so check them.

Private property has no MOP. Its gate is financial, and it is the duty window under Taxes below. But other eligibility points apply to any seller. An undischarged bankrupt needs the Official Assignee's or trustee's consent before an HDB flat can be sold. After a divorce, an HDB flat is sold on production of the court order. And where the owner lacks mental capacity, the sale needs a donee under a Lasting Power of Attorney or a court-appointed deputy. Each of these adds weeks.

Citizenship status: what your passport changes on the way out

The seller's rules are mostly blind to nationality. SSD, for example, depends on the type of property, the date you bought and the date you sold; IRAS's FAQ names those three things and no others. What nationality changes is whether you have CPF to refund, who your buyers can be, what you may do while waiting, and what the next purchase costs.

Singapore Citizen

A Singapore Citizen can sell after MOP, has full CPF to refund, may rent out the whole flat while waiting (only citizens may, as HDB states it), and pays 0% ABSD on a first replacement home, 20% on the second and 30% on the third. If you are moving from a subsidised flat to another subsidised flat, a resale levy applies, paid in cash or from sale proceeds and never from a housing loan.

Permanent Resident

A PR seller has the same MOP and the same CPF refund. Two differences bite. Under HDB's rule a PR cannot let out a whole flat, so the option of renting while you wait for a buyer is closed. And a PR who buys private property while owning an HDB flat has 6 months to dispose of the flat. ABSD on the next purchase is 5% on a first, 30% on a second and 35% on a third residential property.

Foreigner

A foreigner cannot use CPF, so there is nothing to refund and the full price less the mortgage is cash. That is a real advantage on the way out. The disadvantages: the buyer pool for landed property is restricted, which matters if you own a house rather than a condo; and a non-resident landlord's rental income is taxed at 24% while you wait. A foreigner may buy a flat or condominium unit without approval, so the condo market is open to your buyers; the landed market is not.

US, Swiss, Liechtenstein, Norwegian and Icelandic nationals

These nationals are taxed as Singapore Citizens for ABSD, which matters when the sale of one home is followed by the purchase of another. The route is a remission application through IRAS's myTax Portal, not an automatic rate. A US green-card holder who is not a US national does not qualify; a US citizen who is also a Singapore PR is charged ABSD at the citizen rate. The essay on the ABSD remission answer carries the mechanics.

US persons selling

Singapore has no capital gains tax on ordinary home sales, but a US citizen is taxed on worldwide income and gain. The IRS lets a bounded amount of gain on a main home be excluded, with a higher limit for a married couple filing jointly. As I understand it, that exclusion needs the home to have been your main home for two of the last five years; I have not re-read the IRS page on that condition this run. Currency matters too: the gain is measured in US dollars, so a Singapore-dollar profit can be a smaller US-dollar one. That is a real reason to talk to a US tax preparer before you sign an OTP. The essay on the US passport answer goes further.

Taxes: the seller's duty window, and everything else on the way out

No capital gains tax, with one exception

Gains from selling a home are generally not taxable in Singapore. The exception is trading: if the pattern of your buying and selling makes it a business, IRAS can tax the gain as income. One home you lived in is not that. A person who buys and flips several is a different case.

Seller's Stamp Duty (SSD)

This is the gate that makes the most money move. SSD is payable on residential property bought on or after 20 February 2010 and sold within the holding period. Since 4 July 2025 the holding period is four years, not three, and the rates were raised: 16% if sold in the first year, 12% in the second, 8% in the third and 4% in the fourth. Nothing after four years. SSD is computed on the higher of the selling price and the market value at the date of sale, so selling to a relative at a discount does not avoid it. It is payable within 14 days.

Here is the sentence to read twice. IRAS's FAQ (Seller's Stamp Duty for Residential Property: FAQs, IRAS, undated; read 29 September 2026) defines the date of sale as the date of the option to purchase; or, if there is none, the date of the sale and purchase agreement; or, where neither applies, the date of transfer. So the clock stops at the option, not at completion. If you are within days of a boundary, the day you grant the option is the day that counts, and your lawyer should confirm which date your option carries. Law firms also have to have the seller complete a declaration form and keep it for at least 5 years.

Worked example, my arithmetic on the ledger rates: a condo sold at S$2,000,000. In the first year SSD is S$320,000; in the second S$240,000; in the third S$160,000; in the fourth S$80,000; after four years, nil. The difference between selling just inside the fourth year and just after it is S$80,000, which is more than an agent's 2% commission on the same price. IRAS's SSD page rendered navigation only when I opened it, and the FAQ's rate table did not extract; the rates above rest on the ledger's earlier reading of MAS's 3 July 2025 release and IRAS's schedule. If the number matters, look at the IRAS page yourself.

For an inherited property the holding period is counted from the deceased's acquisition, not from the date the estate received it. Transfers under a matrimonial court order are not charged BSD, ABSD or SSD. See the inherited-property and divorce pages on this site.

Buyer's duties are yours indirectly

BSD and ABSD are the buyer's cost, not yours. But they set what a buyer can pay you. BSD on residential property is 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$1.5 million and 6% on the remainder; on S$2 million that is S$69,600, paid within 14 days. A foreigner buying your home faces 60% ABSD, so foreign demand for your unit is close to nil at that rate unless the buyer qualifies under an FTA remission.

Property tax and rental income while you wait

You own the home until completion, so property tax is yours until then. Owner-occupier rates are granted to one property only. If you have moved out and not sold, vacant residential property gets no relief and is taxed at the non-owner-occupier rates. If you let the home while waiting, rent is taxable; you can claim 15% of gross rent as deemed expenses, or actual expenses, but the choice must be consistent across your tenanted residential properties; and a rental loss cannot be carried forward or set against other income, though as an administrative concession it may be set against another property's taxable rental income in the same year if all are let at market rates. A whole HDB flat may be let only after MOP. Decide the sale date first; a few months of rent is a smaller number than an SSD boundary or a void.

The CPF refund: what leaves the cheque

If you used CPF for the home, the principal you withdrew plus accrued interest goes back into your CPF account on sale. CPF Board's page (CPF refund when selling or transferring property, last updated 11 June 2026) says the refund is the principal withdrawn plus the accrued interest, and that for members aged 55 and above the pledged amount is also refunded; it does not state the interest rate. The accrual is what the money would have earned in the Ordinary Account, which is 2.5% a year in the third quarter of 2026. You are refunding your own savings to yourself, not paying a tax; the money comes back to your account, but it is not cash you can spend. It can fund your next home, and that is about all it can fund: CPF cannot be used for renovation, and it cannot pay property tax or MCST fees.

Two details change what you receive. First, any option money or exercise fee you take from the buyer in cash counts as part of the selling price and must be refunded to CPF before the sale completes. Second, if the price does not cover both the loan and the full CPF refund, CPF says you only refund the selling price less the outstanding loan, and you are not required to make up the shortfall in cash provided the property sold at market value. HDB's search-result text covers the loan side: if the price is not enough to clear the loan, you pay the shortfall in cash before the sale can go ahead. Both hold at once: the loan is the lender's priority; the CPF refund takes what remains.

Net proceeds: what you actually walk away with

Order of payment on an HDB sale: the outstanding housing loan first, then your CPF principal plus accrued interest, then the cash balance comes to you by cheque at the completion appointment.

Worked example, invented inputs, my arithmetic. An HDB flat sold at S$700,000, past MOP. Outstanding loan S$150,000. CPF principal used S$180,000; accrued interest assumed S$50,000. Agent's commission 1% of the price, S$7,000, plus 9% GST, S$630. Legal fee S$2,500, the low end of the ledger range. Subtract the loan: S$550,000. Subtract the CPF refund of S$230,000, which goes into your CPF account: S$320,000. Subtract commission and legal fee of S$10,130: about S$309,870 in cash. So the S$700,000 price becomes about S$309,870 in cash plus S$230,000 back in CPF, a total of S$539,870. The other S$160,130 went to the lender and the two professionals. The figure to plan the next home around is the S$309,870, not the S$539,870, because the S$230,000 can only be spent on housing.

A private sale is the same order with different edges: mortgage redemption (including any early-repayment penalty), the CPF refund, SSD if you are inside four years, agent's commission at about 2%, and legal fees. HDB publishes a Sale Proceeds Calculator; I did not run it this session, so I cannot tell you how closely it matches the above.

Borrowing: the loan you are leaving, and the loan you are about to need

Selling is the point where two loans meet: the one you redeem and the one you may need for the next home. Both have gates.

Redeeming the loan you have

An HDB loan has no lock-in period and no early-repayment penalty; a bank loan usually does. Most bank packages carry a two-year lock-in with a penalty of about 1.5% of the outstanding loan for exiting inside it. On a S$1,000,000 balance that is S$15,000, and it is the one gate on this page you can beat by timing alone: if you are 20 months into a lock-in and no buyer is in sight, waiting four months may be cheaper, unless a falling market costs you more than 1.5% in the meantime. Once an HDB loan is refinanced to a bank you cannot return it to HDB, so a decision made years ago can still be shaping your exit.

Funding the next home

The next loan is judged on your income after the sale, not on your equity. The total debt servicing ratio (TDSR) caps total monthly debt repayments at 55% of gross monthly income, tested at a floor interest rate of 4%; for HDB flats and executive condominiums a mortgage servicing ratio of 30% also applies. The loan-to-value (LTV) limit depends on how many housing loans you still have: MAS's page (Loan Tenure and Loan-to-Value Limits, updated 27 March 2024) gives a 75% limit and a 5% cash minimum with no loan outstanding, 45% with one outstanding and a 25% cash minimum, and 35% with two or more. Lower limits apply where the tenure exceeds 30 years (25 for an HDB flat) or the loan runs past age 65. The consequence for a seller: if you buy before the old home's loan is discharged, the new loan is a second loan at 45%. The order of sale and purchase is a borrowing decision as much as a tax one.

Bridging, and what to fix or float

If you must buy before the sale completes, a bridging loan covers the gap, and CPF cannot repay it directly; the refund from the old sale does. April 2026 rates were 4.88% to 5.75% a year at banks, with a processing fee of about 1% often waived. One guide's illustration: S$300,000 bridged for four months at 5.5% costs about S$5,500 in interest. If the old sale falls through, you can be left holding two housing loans, and if a bridge runs past six months the TDSR exemption falls away. Bridging is not available to fund an investment property. Non-bank bridging is dearer at roughly 6% to 9%. See the bridging page.

On floating versus fixed, by phase. While you are marketing the home, do not reprice for the sake of it; the penalty can wipe out the saving. During a bridging window the rate is floating by construction and the window is short, so the time matters more than the rate. For the next home, PropertyNet's aggregator reported in September 2026 a three-month compounded SORA of about 1.19% and the lowest two-year fixed package on a completed property at about 1.40%; floating packages are priced at SORA plus a bank spread. Stacked found a bank loan cheaper than the 2.6% HDB rate in most of the months it examined, which is a reason to check before assuming the HDB loan is the cheap one. If you are buying an uncompleted unit, banks offer floating only in the first years.

Renovation, additions and rebuilds: what to do to the home before it sells

The honest answer for most sellers is very little. Renovation is generally capital expenditure and not deductible against a home sale; CPF cannot pay for it; and one contractor's guide claims pre-sale renovations pay back, which is a claim from someone who sells renovations. I have seen no independent evidence for it, and a buyer who plans to renovate will not pay for your taste. The exception is repair: a leak or a defect that will come off the price anyway is worth fixing before viewings. Keep a contingency of 10% to 15% on top of any quote. If the home is an HDB flat, wall hacking needs HDB approval, so a non-compliant renovation you leave behind can become a problem you sell.

For landed property the question changes. A landed seller has the most control here, because the house may be worth more as land than as a building. An addition or alteration stays an A&A only if it passes URA's tests, including that it adds no more than a bounded share of gross floor area; beyond that, it is a rebuild. A house already above today's permissible envelope cannot simply be rebuilt to the same bulk, so read the URA rule before you demolish or market it as a knock-down. Construction cost guides give about S$180 to S$300 per square foot for A&A against S$300 to S$500 for a new build, and valuers value landed property as land first, with the building depreciated. The sensible sequence for a landed seller is a land-value view before any work at all. See the A&A-before-you-sell page and the landed selling page.

Conveyancing: the paperwork that moves the money

On an HDB sale the legal fee is typically S$2,500 to S$5,000 with a lawyer, and from about S$1,800 at a discount conveyancer (Ohmyhome via Yahoo News Singapore). HDB can also handle the transaction directly, which is why the account-details deadline above exists. On a private sale no government fee schedule exists; law firms set their own, and a market range for a condo is about S$2,300 to S$3,200 plus 9% GST and disbursements. With an independent lawyer, the buyer's bank appoints its own for the mortgage side, which is a separate bill on the buyer's side; you as seller pay for the redemption of your own mortgage.

The steps in order, for a private sale: your lawyer obtains the redemption statement from your lender; the buyer's lawyer requisitions title; seller's stamp duty, if any, is paid within 14 days; at completion the buyer's money is paid, your loan is redeemed, any CPF refund is made, and the balance comes to you. Documents are lodged electronically with the Singapore Land Authority. Stamp duty on the instrument is due within 14 days of signing in Singapore and 30 days if signed overseas.

Most sellers hire a lawyer once, so the cost of a wrong hire is a delayed completion, not the fee. Ask what date your lawyer expects the loan redemption and the CPF refund to complete. See the conveyancing page.

Estate: when the seller is a family, or a memory

A sale can begin because an owner died. Estate property cannot be legally transferred or sold before a grant of probate or letters of administration, so the first step is the grant. The Family Justice Courts' guide puts court processing of a straightforward application at about 2 to 3 months. An executor or administrator selling an HDB estate flat has a time limit, and a beneficiary who already owns another property must dispose of an inherited flat within a set period. Where the deceased and a co-owner held the property as joint tenants, it passes automatically to the survivor without a grant. See the inherited property page and the estate guide.

The other direction matters more for the seller who is alive. Selling turns a home, which passes by your will or by survivorship, into two different things: cash, which is in your estate, and the CPF refund, which is not. CPF savings are not covered by a will and do not form part of the estate; with no nomination, the Public Trustee distributes them under the intestacy rules. Marriage automatically revokes an existing CPF nomination. So a seller who has just sold, married since and never renominated may hold the S$230,000 in the worked example above where it goes somewhere they did not choose. Nominations are made online through Singpass. Estate duty was abolished for deaths on or after 15 February 2008.

The voice: twelve questions about the exit

The two questions that sort a reader are not whether you bought to invest or to live. They are: were you borrowing to buy, and once you held it, were you lending it out? For a seller both are questions about the past, and they decide what is left to redeem and what income stops. Ask them once about the home you are leaving and again about the next one.

The 2x2 in plain terms. Cash and own use: pure appreciation, no carry, nothing to redeem. Cash and let out: yield, positive carry by construction, and the yield stops when you sell. Borrowed and own use: negative carry by construction, which most owner-occupiers live in and few say; the sale ends the carry and returns the principal. Borrowed and let out: the spread play, where the gap between rent and financing cost was the whole game, and the sale ends it.

C0. The play: balance sheet or cash flow?

Selling your own home is a balance-sheet event: one large asset and one large liability leave together, and what remains is cash and CPF. It is not a cash-flow event unless you were letting the home out, in which case the rent stops and that is a cash-flow event too. Which one it is decides what to worry about: balance-sheet plays fail on price, cash-flow plays fail on timing.

C1. Balance sheet: what you own and what you owe

Before: an asset at its market value, a loan against it, and a claim by your own CPF account on the sale, since the refund comes out of your proceeds ahead of your cash. After: the asset is gone, the loan is gone, the CPF claim is settled into your account, and you hold cash. In the worked example, S$700,000 of home became S$309,870 of cash and S$230,000 of CPF, and the S$150,000 loan disappeared. Net worth changed only by the S$10,130 of fees, plus any SSD. A sale is a swap of assets, not a gain, until you buy the next one.

C2. Cash flow: what moves in and out, and when

The timing is the risk. Money in: the option fee at signing (to you, but part of the price and refundable to CPF if it was paid in cash), the exercise fee, and the balance at completion, about 8 weeks after approval on an HDB sale; the CPF refund lands in your account 7 to 14 working days after completion. Money out: SSD within 14 days, legal fees, commission, the mortgage redemption and any lock-in penalty, all on or before completion. If you have bought the next home first, the funding gap is the deposit and any ABSD, in cash, on a date fixed by the seller of that home, while your money sits in a sale that has not completed. That is where the bridging loan comes in, and it is the reason most sell-first sellers rent for a few months.

C3. P&L: what it does to profit, which is not the same as cash

The profit on a home sale is what you receive all-in less what you paid all-in, and it is a different number from the cash. It is not taxed. Where it matters: you may show a gain of S$200,000 on paper and receive S$309,870, because the loan and the CPF refund go first. You may also show a loss and still receive cash, because the sale repaid a loan. A seller who reads the cheque as the profit misreads the position. A seller who let the home out has a second profit line, rental income less interest and expenses, which is taxed, unlike the gain, and whose losses cannot be carried forward.

C4. Carry: income minus financing cost

While you own it, carry is the rent (or the value of living there) minus the mortgage interest and holding costs. Selling turns the carry off, which is a relief if it was negative and a loss if it was positive. An owner-occupier with a mortgage has negative carry by construction: interest, property tax and MCST fees with no income. A vacant home you have moved out of has the worst carry of all: no income, non-owner-occupier property tax, and a mortgage. Every month unsold has a real cost, and no government page shows it.

C5. Give and get: the trade, stated plainly

You give up the asset, the option on its future price, and the certainty of a roof. You get cash, freed borrowing capacity and a clean date. You also give a percentage of the price to an agent, a fee to a lawyer, possibly SSD, and possibly a lock-in penalty. The trade is not the price; it is the price less the exit costs, in return for optionality: money that can go to the next home or to reducing debt. If you have no next use for it, the trade is worse than it looks.

C6. Exposed to

Price: between listing and option the market can move against you; after the option the price is fixed, but the buyer can walk away for the cost of the option fee. Time: a slow sale in a falling market costs more than any fee. Buyer financing: if the bank values the home below the price, the buyer must cover the gap in cash, and a buyer who cannot means a failed sale. Policy: rules have changed within a year. SSD lengthened from three years to four and rose in July 2025; the 15-month wait-out for former private owners buying HDB was removed in July 2026; executive condominium rules changed in May 2026. The next change will land on someone, and you cannot predict whom. Your own paper: MOP dates, quotas and bank penalties are documents to read now, not on the day.

C7. For how long

The commitment is short but its start is early. An HDB seller is looking at 8 to 10 weeks after the option, plus however long it took to find a buyer; a private seller at about 8 weeks after the option, or 10 to 12 with a buyer's mortgage. The horizon that matters comes before that: whether you can hold to a duty boundary, whether you can hold through a lock-in, and how long you can carry two homes if you buy first. Selling is decided months before the OTP, when you work out how long you can afford to be a seller.

C8. The failure cascade: in what order it goes wrong

It goes in a fixed order. First, negative carry: you own two homes, or one vacant home, and pay interest, tax and fees with no income. That hits cash flow, since the money leaves each month whether or not a buyer appears. It accumulates into the profit line as a growing loss before the sale even happens. If the market falls in the same period, you reach negative equity, where the price no longer covers the loan and the CPF refund. Then illiquidity: a home priced below the loan cannot be sold without cash from you, and you may not have it. Then insolvency, where default is the only way out. Each step feeds the next. The cheapest place to stop it is the first: a price you accept early beats the price you wanted late.

C9. Liquidity: how fast, at what haircut

Slower than a share portfolio. Weeks to months from listing to option, then about 8 to 12 weeks to completion. The haircut is the price cut you take to accelerate it, plus the exit costs above: about 1.4% in commission and legal fees on the HDB worked example, and about 2% commission plus legal on a private sale. There is also a haircut no one lists: a short-lease home or a quota-bound block sells at a discount, or slowly. Landed property at the top end sells more slowly still; average time on the market for a Good Class Bungalow runs from several months to over a year, and they are typically sold off-market.

C10. Control: can you move the outcome, or are you a price-taker?

You are a price-taker on the market, and you have control over five things: when you sell relative to MOP and the SSD boundary; which agent, at what commission and on what agreement; whether you sell before or after buying; whether you fix a defect before viewings; and, for landed property, whether the value is in the house or the land. This page's expression of control is renovation, A&A and rebuild, covered above: mostly little on a flat, material on landed property. Do not spend money to change what the market decides. Spend it, or wait, only where a specific rule or a specific defect is the gate.

C11. The exit: how you get out and what it costs

Selling is the exit; the question is the exit from the sale. Once you have granted an option, you are committed to that buyer, and the buyer's walk-away costs them only the option fee. Once completion is done, there is no going back. The cost of the exit in the worked examples: about S$10,130 in fees on the HDB flat; and on a S$2 million condo, SSD of S$80,000 to S$320,000 if you sell inside four years, plus commission at 2% (S$40,000 before GST) and legal fees. If the exit is a divorce, a death, a collective sale or an inherited flat, it has its own page, linked below.

The B2B spoke: who pays to reach a seller at the moment of sale

A seller who has just decided to sell is the most valuable lead in the property chain, because a sale triggers a sequence of purchases: an agent, a lawyer, a mortgage adviser, a bridging lender, a renovator, a mover, and often a new home. Each of those businesses has a reason to be on your page. That is why any list of recommended providers on a page like this deserves suspicion.

What I can source. On the professional side, private conveyancing for a condo is about S$2,300 to S$3,200 plus GST with no official schedule, and HDB resale legal fees run S$2,500 to S$5,000 with a lawyer. On the lender side, a bridging loan is 4.88% to 5.75% at banks and roughly 6% to 9% privately. What I cannot source is what any of these businesses pay to be introduced to a seller. I found no published referral-fee schedule for lawyers, mortgage brokers or bridging lenders, and I will not guess one. If a page recommends a firm without saying whether it is paid for the introduction, assume it is.

The seller who is a company. A company selling a residential property is not in the same position as an individual: a gain is taxed as income if it is trading, and a sale of shares in a property-holding entity can attract additional conveyance duty for sellers of up to 16% where the equity was acquired within a set period. An entity is a company, property trust, partnership, limited liability partnership or business trust; a property-holding entity has at least half of its tangible assets in Singapore residential property. Bank lending to a company follows commercial standards rather than the TDSR, which does not apply to companies. If you are selling a company that owns a home, this is a different page from the rest of this one; the structures page is the place to start.

The seller who is a collective. En-bloc sales are marketed by agents on commission; a search-result summary reports about 1% for the marketing agent, which I did not verify. The 2026 amendments, as reported by secondary sources and not read from the Ministry of Law this run, set consent thresholds by building age (65% and 70% in the two older bands), a 35% requisition, a six-month signature window and a three-year cool-down. See the collective sale page.

The seller who is an employer. If an employer provided the housing, the benefit-in-kind reporting stops when the home is sold or the occupant leaves. That is HR's and payroll's date, not the homeowner's, and worth telling them.

The realtor economics: what an agent earns on your sale, and where the incentive points

A licensed agent's income on a sale is a commission on the price, paid at completion, and only if the sale completes. There is no fixed rate. The Council for Estate Agencies' consumer page (Buying or selling, CEA, last updated 18 August 2025) says so directly: there are no fixed commission rates nor prescribed guidelines on commission amounts, and you should agree the amount and terms with your agent before they start work. Market guides put the seller's commission at about 2% on a private sale, with the buyer's agent paid from that by co-broke, and about 1% on an HDB resale. In a CEA survey, almost 8 in 10 consumers were aware that commission is negotiable, and 85% of those who negotiated succeeded in lowering it.

The mechanics CEA fixes: sign a Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement before the agent starts; choose exclusive (one agent has sole rights for the period) or non-exclusive; pay the property agency, not the agent personally; and an agent may not collect commission from more than one party in the same transaction.

What the agent earns. On a S$1,500,000 private sale at 2%, the commission is S$30,000 before GST, split between the two agencies and then between each agency and its salesperson. I have no sourced figure for those splits and they vary by agency. Market-reported median annual agent income is around S$72,000, and new agents earn S$10,000 to S$40,000, from one market source I could not check against CEA. Read that as: a salesperson needs a number of completions each year to live on, and your sale is one of them.

Where the incentive points. First, speed over price. Suppose your price rises by 1%, S$15,000 on S$1,500,000. At a 2% commission the extra commission is S$300 before splits and the salesperson gets a fraction of it; you keep S$14,700. If instead your agent talks you into a price 2% lower that sells in half the time, the agency gives up S$600 of commission and saves weeks of work, and you give up S$30,000. That arithmetic is why you price on evidence and ask for the comparables in writing. Second, the exclusive agreement locks you to one agent for a set period and pays them if anyone finds a buyer, so read its length and termination terms. Third, the double-ender: the same agency on both sides is where the rule against collecting from more than one party matters, and it is worth asking whether that is happening.

And where the incentive points against the agent. If your best move is not to sell, the agent earns nothing for saying so. Selling a condo just inside the fourth year rather than just after it can cost you S$80,000 on a S$2,000,000 price, and an agent who tells you to wait gives up this year's commission for a client who may come back. Letting instead of selling pays an agent about half a month's to a month's rent from the landlord, against a full commission on a sale. If your best move is to redeem the loan, refinance or rent it out, the agent's share of that advice is small. So the cleanest test of an agent is to ask what they would tell you if you did not want to sell today. The same test applies to any agent reached through this page, and to whoever runs it.

What to do. Ask for the commission in writing, as a percentage, with GST stated. Ask whether the agreement is exclusive and for how long. Ask for the last five comparable sales in the same block or development, with dates. Ask what happens to the commission if you withdraw. And check CEA's register, not the agent's word, for a licence: estate agency work without registration is an offence with a fine of up to S$75,000.

What I could not verify

Stated plainly, because a page on money should say where it is thin.

• IRAS's Seller's Stamp Duty page rendered navigation only. The FAQ PDF read this run confirmed the date-of-sale definition, the higher-of price or market value basis, the 20 February 2010 start and the five-year retention of the declaration, but its rate table did not extract. The four rates and the four-year period rest on the ledger's earlier reading of MAS's 3 July 2025 release and IRAS's schedule.
• HDB's selling pages: two URLs I tried returned 404; the eligibility and process pages rendered without dates or figures; the MOP terms, the loan-shortfall rule and the CPF refund timing come from HDB text seen in search-result excerpts, not a page opened in full. I did not run HDB's Sale Proceeds Calculator.
• CPF Board's refund page does not state the interest rate. The 2.5% is CPF Board's third-quarter 2026 Ordinary Account rate from the ledger, used as the accrual rate.
• BSD, ABSD and the FTA remission come from the ledger's earlier reads of IRAS; IRAS's own pages returned navigation only this run.
• The HDB subsidy-recovery percentages, the en-bloc figures, the commission norms, the agent income figure and the bridging rates come from secondary sources.
• The worked examples use invented inputs and my arithmetic. They illustrate the order of payments; they are not quotes, and your figures will differ.
• US tax treatment: the exclusion comes from the ledger's IRS read; the two-of-five-years condition is my understanding and was not re-read this run.

Nothing on this page has been signed off; it is a draft.

Where to go next

Sources

• CPF Board — CPF refund when selling or transferring property (last updated 11 June 2026) (2026-06-11) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg/member/home-ownership/using-your-cpf-to-buy-a-home/cpf-refund-when-selling-or-transferring-property
• HDB — Application Process for Sale of Flat (undated; read 29 September 2026) (2026-09-29) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/managing-my-home/selling-a-flat/process-for-selling-a-flat/resale-flat-application/application-process
• HDB — Eligibility for Selling a Flat (undated; read 29 September 2026; no dates or figures on the page) (2026-09-29) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/managing-my-home/selling-a-flat/eligibility
• HDB — Acquiring Private Property (page rendered navigation only apart from the MOP sentence) (2026-09-29) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/managing-my-home/home-ownership/acquiring-private-property
• HDB — Resale Completion (search-result excerpt only; page returned 404 when fetched directly) (2026-09-29) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/selling-a-flat/resale-completion
• IRAS — Seller's Stamp Duty (SSD) for Residential Property: Frequently Asked Questions (undated; read 29 September 2026) (2026-09-29) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/media/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/pdf/faqs-on-ssd-residential10c3.pdf?sfvrsn=27c18395_2
• IRAS — Seller's Stamp Duty (SSD) for Residential Property (page rendered navigation only on 29 September 2026) (2026-09-29) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/stamp-duty/for-property/selling-or-disposing-property/seller's-stamp-duty-(ssd)-for-residential-property
• IRAS — Buyer's Stamp Duty (BSD) (navigation only this run; rates via the ledger) (2026-09-29) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/stamp-duty/for-property/buying-or-acquiring-property/buyer's-stamp-duty-(bsd)
• IRAS — Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) (navigation only this run; rates via the ledger) (2026-09-29) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/stamp-duty/for-property/buying-or-acquiring-property/additional-buyer's-stamp-duty-(absd)
• MAS — Loan Tenure and Loan-to-Value Limits (updated 27 March 2024) (2024-03-27) · https://www.mas.gov.sg/regulation/explainers/new-housing-loans/loan-tenure-and-loan-to-value-limits
• MAS — MSR and TDSR Rules for New Housing Loans (revised 16 December 2021; not re-read this run) (2021-12-16) · https://www.mas.gov.sg/regulation/explainers/new-housing-loans/msr-and-tdsr-rules
• CEA — Buying or selling (engaging a property agent; last updated 18 August 2025) (2025-08-18) · https://www.cea.gov.sg/consumers/engaging-a-property-agent/buying-or-selling/
• CPF Board — HDB loan or bank loan? 3 differences you should know (12 June 2026) (2026-06-12) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg/member/infohub/educational-resources/3-differences-between-hdb-loan-and-bank-loan
• CPF Board — What happens to the deceased member's property bought using his CPF savings (2026-02-23) (2026-02-23) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg/service/article/what-happens-to-the-deceased-member-s-property-bought-using-his-cpf-savings
• HDB — Eligibility for Renting Out a Flat (not re-read this run) (2026-09-28) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/managing-my-home/home-ownership/renting-out-a-flat-or-bedrooms/renting-out-a-flat/eligibility
• URA — Additions and Alterations to Landed Housing (last updated 7 June 2026; not re-read this run) (2026-06-07) · https://www.ura.gov.sg/guidelines/development-control/development-control-handbooks/residential/bungalows/aa-landed-housing/